


Together Like the Devil and Sin

by riyku



Category: CW Network RPF, Supernatural RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-02
Updated: 2013-07-02
Packaged: 2017-12-16 18:44:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/865356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riyku/pseuds/riyku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A few nights a week, Jared lights a candle in the window and opens the doors to his speakeasy, welcoming one and all, so long as they know the password and how to keep their mouths shut. When the liquor starts to dry up and the revenuers start closing in, Jared is forced to hang all of his fortunes on Jensen, a bootlegger who offers him a lot of pretty promises and an even prettier smile. Together, they set off on a run that will take them from mountain hollows to metropolitan hideouts, from backwoods shacks to ritzy hotels and all points in between. They couldn't be more different; Jared is unassuming, low-keyed, and Jensen is as flashy as his souped-up Buick, but they soon discover that they have a lot more than moonshine in common.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Together Like the Devil and Sin

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2013 spn_j2_bigbang
> 
> Please go [here](http://mithborien.dreamwidth.org/117555.html) for the mithborien's lovely artwork!

 

  

 

 

Jared lights a candle, watches as the sputtering flame fully catches hold and balances it on the skinny window ledge, the soft, warm glow reflecting off of the rippled glass. He walks into the room at the opposite end of the apartment above the store, dodging the sparse furniture from memory. His shadow jumps into flickering life on the wall behind him as he repeats the ritual.

“Open for business,” he says, dragging a weary hand through his hair. It’s getting overlong, and Jared reminds himself, again, that he should probably ask Jim for a haircut, but the man has been busy of late. They both have been.

The staircase is steep, and it creaks under his feet as he descends. He's careful to set the lock on the door separating the store from the private quarters above, and tucks the key safely into the small pocket in his vest.

Light from the street lamps outside glints off of the rows and rows of jars and bottles lined up neatly on shelves behind the counter. Potions and compounds. He ducks under the counter, runs his fingertips along their smooth, curved glass surfaces, their labels unreadable in the dim light. He picks one from the shelf and works the cork free, holding it beneath his nose. It’s the good stuff, grade A and government sanctioned, clear and golden, the color of a liquid sunrise. Not at all like the rotgut they sell downstairs. Jared takes a tentative sip, straight from the bottle.

“Hands off the inventory.”

Jared startles at the sound of the voice, sputters on his second sip and wipes at his mouth with the back of his hand. Chris emerges from the shadows, ducking beneath the soda counter in the back and knuckling his hat up and away from his forehead.

Jared flashes a grin. “C’mon. It’s medicine.” He tips the bottle in Chris’s direction. “I have it on good authority.”

“Make sure you tell Jim that. Chris says, taking a small sip and then another before handing it back to Jared, who snugly plugs the cork in again. “Boss wants to see you by the way. Reckon he’s got an errand for you to run.”

“Another one? As if keeping all of you in line isn’t enough.” Jared pulls a face.

“At Least we got a job,” Chris reminds him. “I wouldn’t go complaining about yours. Not too loudly, anyway.”

Jared gives him a wry half-mile. Chris is right. Most aren’t that fortunate. “Did you hear about old man Reynold’s place?” he asks.

Chris nods. “A dozen cases of hooch, smashed in the street for all to see. I’m surprised the drunks weren’t out there licking the sidewalk. Goddamn shame for Reynold. Made the front page of the papers.”

“He’s got a kid, too.” Jared shakes his head. “Little girl. Still in pigtails and she saw the whole rotten thing. Watched them drag her daddy out into the street. Betcha _that_ didn’t make the front page.”

“Family?”

“He talks about a sister in Jersey. She’ll take the girl in. Hopefully.”

“Like I said, goddamn shame.” Chris makes for the door and Jared moves to lock it behind him. “What’s the password tonight?”

“Rigormortis.”

Chris snorts a laugh. “Jibber jabber. You make that up?”

“It’s Latin.” Jared shrugs. “Be careful out there. Anything doesn’t feel right and we’ll close up for the night. Reynold last week. Mercer’s joint a week before that. They’re getting closer.”

“Revenuers,” Chris spits, gives Jared a salute and heads out into the night. Jared watches him as he takes the corner, jogging around the corner of the building and toward the back door which will be his post until the early hours of the morning.

Jared heads down a hallway so narrow that his shoulders brush it with every other step, then into a storage closet. Its back wall is cedar paneled, and Jared’s fingers find the latch with practiced ease. There’s a quiet click, and the panel moves forward a fraction then slides to the side, silently on well-oiled runners. He enters a small alcove with a door at the back, two cases of rum on his left and an open case of gin on the right. The stock’s getting low. Rumor says the last shipment slated for town got hijacked by some outfit operating out of Chicago right at the state line a few days back. The whiskey ran dry last week and Jared guesses the gin might not last the night. It’s a good thing their clientele isn’t all that particular. Not much room for refined tastes nowadays.

Soft voices murmur from behind the door, and music starts, seeps up through the floorboards beneath his feet, a bright tinkling of notes. Jared smiles. Lily’s at the piano again. Jared taps on the door with two fingers. Three knocks, a pause followed by two more, then he enters without waiting for an invitation.

Three men occupy the small, windowless space that had once served as a storeroom before the eighteenth amendment became the new law of the land: Jim sits behind his desk and Misha sits in front of it. Jared doesn’t recognize the third man leaning against the wall. Everything about him says money though, from the clean, tailored cut of his pinstriped suit to the polish on his wingtips. Most of his face is hidden behind a brimmed hat that's pulled down nearly to his nose, his chin tipped down toward his chest, but Jared catches a glimpse of pale skin, a strong, smooth jaw and a full mouth, pursed in thought.

Each of them holds a glass, and Jared’s nose says that it’s probably the last of the good scotch, straight from Jim's personal stash. Not the kind of thing that Jim would crack open for just anybody. He's pulled it out to prove a point. Broker a deal. Immediately, Jared's on edge.

"There you are, kid," Jim says, waving him closer.

Jared rankles at the nickname but lets it slide. Jim's an old friend, more like family. He's known Jared since before he took his first steps, took him in and gave him a job when things started to go south. Two years of medical school to his name and now Jared's an apprentice to a pharmacist who sells hooch on the side. Strange days they’re living in. Such strange times.

“Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Jensen Ackles,” Jim says. “A gentleman of dubious intent and the finest purveyor of whiskey this side of Canada.” Jim’s tone is devoid of sarcasm but his smile isn’t. It’s sharp, a man could get cut by it if he found himself standing too close.

“You’re too kind, Mr. Beaver,” Jensen says, then pushes off of the wall and turns toward Jared. Now that he’s come out of his hunch, Jared sees that he’s tall, broad shouldered. His eyes are an incredible shade of green and lit up by a spark of humor. “Although ‘purveyor’ seems somewhat high brow, don’t you think?” He reaches out and takes Jared’s hand, his palm warm and his handshake solid. His voice is deep, a little raspy, and there’s a slight lilt to his speech that makes Jared think that he’s the son of a Scottish mother. If he had to venture a guess, Jared would say Appalachia.

“What should we call you, then?” Jared asks.

“I prefer ‘smuggler.’ It lends a certain air of adventure to the whole enterprise,” Jensen says around a broad gesture of his hand. “I am the finest, though. I’ll give you that.”

Not only is he a dandy, but he’s got an ego to match. Jared should have known. “Then how come I’ve never heard of you?”

He chuckles, gives Jared a sly, sideways glance. “Doesn’t do a man any good to have a reputation in this particular line of work.” Jensen raises his glass to his mouth but it’s just for show. He doesn’t take a sip, only wets his lips.

Misha rises, snapping open his cuffs and rolling his sleeves up. “That's enough, gentlemen. “ He takes a starched, white apron from the shelf behind him and ties it snugly around his waist. “I have a room brimming with lawbreakers to facilitate below decks.” As he brushes past Jared, he pauses, a hand on Jared’s upper arm. “Agree to the terms, whatever they are,” he whispers low, lips barely moving. “If you don’t, we might all be out of a job by the end of the week.”

Jared lifts his eyebrows in a question, but Misha has already moved on, sliding the door closed behind himself. He turns to Jim, just in time to see the man empty his glass and hiss a breath between his teeth. He holds the highball up on tented fingers, watches the way the light refracts in the cut of the crystal, then inexplicably shakes his head.

“Let’s just cut to the chase,” Jim says, leaning back in his chair and regarding each of them in turn. He stabs a finger in Jared’s direction. “Our new acquaintance here is going to be making a run for us, and you’re going with him.”

Jared opens his mouth to speak, but whatever he’s about to say gets drowned out by Jensen’s similar protest. The two of them stop simultaneously, and after a beat, Jensen continues in a mollifying tone. “I understand that you would want to keep an eye your investment, but these dealings can be very...delicate. Folks get a little jumpy around strangers.”

“You’ve proven my point,” Jim says with a shrug. “You waltz into here with a bucket full of promises that sure sound nice. You want me to hand over all our liquid assets on a handshake and a pretty smile, with absolutely nothing to back it up? Put yourself in our shoes for a minute. The world ain’t what it used to be. I’m gonna need a little more than that. Jared goes with you and we have a deal. If you refuse, then we don’t.”

“Do I get a say in all of this?” Jared asks, although he knows the answer, knows it’s his place to ask how high whenever Jim says jump.

“Not particularly.” Jim runs a hand through his thinning hair. “The world ain’t what it used to be,” he repeats, “and the folks I trust are few and far between.”

It’s a neat little trick, nice and tidy, pulling the trust card out of his deck at this point in the game. Jared almost laughs. Instead he curls his tongue around his canine tooth to stave it off, and gives Jim the smallest nod. It’s best not to make waves, makes it easier on Jared if he keeps it toned down to small ripples.

Jensen’s chewing on his bottom lip, eyes narrowed down to slits as he swirls the liquor in his glass, staring into it like he’s some kind of fortune teller looking to divine his own future hidden inside a crystal ball. After a long, drawn-out moment, Jensen sets his glass on the corner of Jim’s desk with enough force that some of the booze splashes over his fingers. “Fine,” he says, “you have yourself a deal, but only because you said that I have a pretty smile.” Jensen flashes a grin at Jared and continues, “We leave in the morning. Six sharp, and don’t keep me waiting.”

 

 

 

Warmth smacks into Jared when he enters the basement bar. It’s crowded, close quarters, upper echelon businessmen rubbing elbows with dock laborers and the maids that made their beds this morning. Some folks steer clear of this place because of that, but Jared’s always believed that a rich man’s money is just as green as a poor man’s. Jim’s of a similar frame of mind, has always said that he’s more concerned with not getting caught than with how his customers occupy their daylight hours.

Behind the piano, Lily switches from the rousing Irish folk song she’s playing into a few quick measures of ‘Here Comes the Bride’ when she catches sight of him, and then winks at him once she knows she has his attention. Jared dodges through the crowd, steering clear of people huddled around the tables and hunching over their glasses like a bunch of dogs protecting their bones. He comes to a stop beside Lily’s upright and straightens the strap of her dress where it has fallen off of her shoulder. A slip of a dress for a small slip of a woman.

He waits for her to wrap up her song before speaking. “I don’t know what you’re doing in a place like this,” he teases as she folds her sheet music. “Talent like yours, you could be playing sold out shows at Carnegie.”

She tips her stemmed glass in his direction, thick red wine with citrus floating on the surface, takes a sip and smiles up at him with red stained lips. “What? And miss out on my nightly dose of your charm? I wouldn’t dream of it. Anyway, I’m not much for tall buildings. You’re about as high up as I wanna go.”

Jared bows his head and draws his shoulders up, trying to hide the blush that Lily’s harmless flirting always seems to bring out in him, and grabs the wine glass from her hand. He takes a sip and puckers his lips. “Sweet,” he says.

“The best way to stretch a bottle of wine is to add rum to it.”

The door bangs shut behind him and a hush ripples through the crowd, raucous chatter simmering down to a low murmur. Lily looks past Jared’s shoulder, her dark eyes suddenly as hard as diamonds. “Stranger,” she whispers.

Jared cautions a backward glance, turns back fast when he sees who it is. Jensen’s standing in the doorway, a small twist to his mouth as if their little establishment isn’t quite passing muster, then makes his way through the room in an obvious swagger, like the whole world’s a stage and it’s his name on the top of the playbill.

With a shake of his head, Jared says, “Not enough of a stranger, if you ask me.”

“There’s a story behind that, and I hope it’s a good one.” Lily jabs him in the side with her elbow and steals her glass back.

“It’s not good at all. Jim’s sending me on a liquor run. With him.”

“Pharmacist turned bootlegger.” Lily frowns as she considers it. “Could be worse. I wouldn’t particularly mind being crammed into a car with nothing to look at but _that_ for a couple of days.”

“Yeah, but you’d probably mind having to listen to him.”

“That bad?”

Jared shrugs. “Something about him just rubs me wrong. The guy’s got an ego on him. ”

“When I was in school, when I was just a little thing, there was this boy who always yanked on my hair and put frogs in my book bag. You know what happened to him?”

Jared shakes his head. “Not sure I want to know.”

“I wound up marrying the poor son of a bitch.”

Lily’s hair tickles Jared’s nose as he leans in close to whisper in her ear. “Sweetheart, you know I’m not really the marrying type.”

“You make me wish I was a man,” she says with titter of laughter and a small pat to his cheek, “and it ain’t because I want to run for office.” She smoothes down the front of her dress and settles onto her piano bench. “I’ll hold down the fort for you while you’re gone. And honey?”

“Yeah?”

Lily takes his hand and gives it a brief squeeze. “Don’t get caught. I don’t wanna be the one to have to tell your momma that her son’s wound up in jail.”

Jared smiles tightly at her and hopes it looks a lot less painful than it feels. “You and me both.”

“Judging from that hangdog look on your face, it would appear that our fortunes have taken a turn for the better,” Misha says when Jared takes his place beside him behind the bar.

Jared holds back an irritated snarl, but it’s a close thing, and thinks about how a small grain of autonomy might be nice for a change. He’s been pulled in so many directions for so long, hardly knows what a day off feels like anymore. “What do you know about him?” he asks.

Jensen’s leaning against the bar, elbow bent on the edge of it, fingers loose around a glass. Everyone in the room is giving him a wide berth, like he’s dug himself an invisible, impenetrable moat. And damnit if Jared can’t force himself to keep his eyes off of him for more than a few seconds at a time, as if Jensen is the only goddamn source of light in the room.

“He’s a friend of a friend of a friend,” Misha tells him. He pours three cocktails and slides them down the length of the bar in quick succession. “Contacted me through the usual circuitous channels. Seems legitimate.”

“ _Seems_? That doesn’t particularly inspire confidence,” Jared says.

Jared’s scared of getting caught, of his face turning up on the front page of the local papers and of losing what small chance he has of putting his life back on the rails. He’s a victim of his own optimism, still opens his mailbox to find the _New England Journal of Medicine_ delivered every three months like clockwork, and tries to not feel too much resentment when he reads the published lectures from his former professors, skims the headlines of medical breakthroughs made by the people he once considered peers. Many nights he lays flat out on his back in bed, too tired to sleep after the doors to the speakeasy have been locked and the glasses are washed and the floors are swept, cooking up lunatic schemes, visions of his own life with impossible fairy tale endings.

“Way I see it, the less we know the better,” Misha tells him.

“Easy for you to say when it’s my ass on the line.”

Misha slides behind him, a hand on Jared’s hip for one glancing moment before he reaches over Jared’s shoulder for a fresh bottle. “Trust me, I wouldn’t hand something so precious over to just anybody.”

Jared darts a look up and down the line of people in front of them, a sinking feeling in his stomach, before he zeros in on Jensen again. There are exactly two people in this town who know the truth about Jared and they’re both within spitting distance. Unfortunately for him, so are about seventy other people.

Clearing his throat, Jared says, “About what you said upstairs. Are we in trouble?”

Misha’s expression goes carefully blank. “You’re going to do your part. We’ll take care of the rest.”

“Candy coating never did anybody any good,” Jared reminds him. “It still tastes like medicine on the inside.”

Misha’s got a rag in his hand, polishing an already spotless stretch of the bar. He pauses, turns to Jared and looks at him with a very rare sort of sincerity. “I suppose you’re right. It’s fair to say that you’re in this just as deep as the rest of us at this point.” He shifts his eyes toward the line of customers, all deep in rowdy conversation. In a whisper, he say, “Simply put, we’re broke.”

“But the pharmacy does alright, and--” Jared starts before Misha cuts him off.

“Jared,” he says, placating, “the business upstairs is keeping this particular endeavor above water, and only barely. At last count, Jim employs about a quarter of the population of this town, in one capacity or another. From politicians to the paper boy. He’s got his spoon in a few too many pots, if you ask me. There’s a lot that goes on in that back room of his, and you don’t know the half of it. Hell, _I_ don’t even know the half it. I don’t want to.”

“We have a full house every night we’re open,” Jared points out, tilting his head toward the room in general. Folks are lined up at the bar, three people deep in a couple of places. Someone new comes in the door every few minutes, and Chris is going to have to start cutting them off soon enough.

"Think about it. Before Volstead, a man could walk into any bar in the land and order a drink and not have to break the bank to do it."

"Yeah," Jared agrees. "I remember when I was in school and a beer used to cost a nickel. Shot of whiskey fifty cents."

Misha snaps his fingers. "Exactly. Ten miles up the road there's this place that’s selling it for five bucks a shot, and from what I've heard, that's not unusual. What's worse, they're cutting their stock with anything they can get their hands on. Machine grade alcohol or formaldehyde. People are getting sick left and right, and the politicians aren't saying a damn thing about that. All these unintended consequences."

"And here were are, undercutting ourselves. Selling the straight stuff for a couple of dollars a hit."

"Depends on how you wanna look at it. We didn't start this to make money. I saw this as a ripe opportunity to fuck over Rockefeller and Henry Ford."

Jared nods. Misha's yet to meet a conspiracy theory he didn't like.

Kate comes up beside them, throws her tray on the back counter and pushes her hair away from her face. "Mr. Walker's at it again. He's all hands tonight. Son of a bitch thinks because he tips me a dollar he can grab my ass all he wants." There's a revolving door of waitresses in the place, but Kate has been around since they first opened their doors. She's a hard worker, possesses one of the foulest mouths Jared has ever come across, and has a no-nonsense heart of gold.

"That didn't take long," Jared says. They've only been open an hour or so and the liquor has already gotten the best of the guy. "I'll get him."

Kate snorts. "I can take care of myself," she protests.

"That's the one thing that I have no doubt about," Jared says. "But you shouldn't have to."

John Walker is bent over a fan of playing cards in the corner, his tie loosened and the top button of his shirt undone. He still has his hat on, cocked crookedly on his head and his face is flushed, broken capillaries on his nose shining like a light bulb. He’s a regular, and after all these years, Jared figures that he'd have a better tolerance.

"Jared, my boy," Walker slurs. He holds up his glass, spilling most of it over his fingers. "Here, have one on me."

Jared takes it and downs what’s left of the drink in one gulp, more to put the brakes on Walker than anything else. "It's time you call it a night."

"Sounds like blondie over there has turned you against me again," he says, offended.

Jared straightens to his full height, plants his feet shoulder-width apart and puts his hands on his hips. "You do that just fine on your own, sir. Now, are you gonna make this easy on me? ‘Cause I’m happy to go either way."

The guy is all knees and elbows as Jared jostles him out the door, nothing but clumsy and sloppy indignation, pulling at Jared's collar and tangling their feet together. Jared tosses him out of the door and Walker staggers, comes to a stop on the sidewalk, toes to the edge of it, comically pinwheeling his arms to keep his balance.

Chris is leaning against the wall beside the door. A cigarette is stuck in the corner of his mouth and he’s squinting through the smoke. "Huh," he says. "That didn't take long at all."

"My thoughts exactly," Jared says with a quick grin.

The narrow alleyway is deserted and dark, the air heavy with a mist that makes it hard to take a deep breath. The walkway between the buildings is rounded cobblestone, dipped in the center and shiny with freshly fallen rain.

Walker is trying to regain some small shred of dignity, straightening his lapels and tightening his tie. He squares his hat on his head and puffs his chest out. "You'll regret this," he says, winded, his breath wheezing loudly in the still night.

"Eh, just like the other dozen times you've wound up on your ass out here," Chris says, dismissive. “I’m still not impressed.”

"You're just as guilty as the rest of us," Jared reminds him. This happens about three times a week and three times a week Jared tells him the same exact thing. Nothing's ever come of it, and Jared has no reason to believe that this time will be any different.

Walker makes a quiet, pathetic hmph sound, and starts in on the zigzagging march that will hopefully get him home and in his bed in once piece.

Jensen's eyeing him when Jared goes back inside, and beckons him over with a curl of his lip and a tilt of his head. Jared frowns but heads over anyway. "Shoulda figured you for the muscle of the operation," he mutters, then slowly drags eyes all along Jared's body, taking in everything from his head to his toes. Jared fights a flush, suddenly warmer than he has any right to be.

Jensen licks his lips slowly, and Jared busies himself fixing his clothes and trying to tame the unruly mop of his hair. Jensen reaches out, hooks his fingers in the waistband of Jared's trousers, setting them to rights, then moves to Jared's collar next, fingertips brushing along Jared’s neck as he stands his collar back up and fastens the top button of his shirt. When he takes a step back to admire his handiwork, he seems satisfied, which leaves Jared feeling flushed all over again. Jensen claps him on the shoulder.

"I do what I have to do," Jared says, offhanded. "It's a good bunch of people, we don't have much trouble here."

“Lucky,” Jensen says, then nods, lifts his glass to his mouth and still doesn't take a sip.

"I heard the stuff works better if you actually swallow," Jared tells him.

Jensen laughs, and Jared feels like he's on the outside of an inside joke. Jensen lifts the glass and holds it up toward the light, as if he's testing the color. "You caught me. It's a prop. No one trusts a sober smuggler."

"Don't tell me you're a teetotaler," Jared says around a chuckle. "That'll be a first."

"I’ve read the pamphlets the ladies at the Temperance League hand out,” Jensen teases. “Don't you know that this stuff will kill you? Besides, a business like mine requires that a man keeps his wits about him."

"You gave up pretty easily up there. Thought you'd put up more of a fight."

"Your employer had his heels dug in pretty deep from the looks of it. If I thought I stood a chance in hell I might have. Times are tough for a freelancer. All the big cats are moving into town, and they’re treating the whole east coast like it’s New York or Chicago. Jim seems like a stand up kinda fellow and I could use the job. Keep in the game," he says, affecting a lofty tone. “I’ve had a strange string of bad luck of late, but who knows, maybe you could be my good luck charm.”

“You’re a gambling man, then.”

“Who isn’t, when you stop to think about it? Anyway,” Jensen says with a wave of his hand, “I believe in luck.”

“Luck?” Jared shakes his head. Luck has never done him any favors. Take his current predicament, for example. “Seems like a bad idea to put so much stock in such a fickle thing.”

“Maybe,” Jensen says, “But a man’s gotta believe in something.”

  

 

 

Barely five hours later, Jared stands on the corner, knapsack slouched at his feet and his hands shoved in his pockets. His teeth chatter against the chilly breeze that whips at his jacket and sneaks in beneath his shirt. It’s getting cold; a couple of weeks and there will be frost in the mornings.

The city is just beginning to wake up, the streets quiet and mostly deserted. A small gang of day laborers are gathered a few blocks down, kicking at stones in the street with their dirty boots, waiting to be picked up, and the sun is only now starting to make its presence known, peeking above the horizon and between the buildings.

It’s no secret that Jared doesn’t want to do this, but he has to admit that he’s warmed up to the idea, and warmed up to Jensen after their conversation last night. A day or two away from the routine of the pharmacy and the bar might do him some good, and gives him a chance to see some places he might not be able to otherwise.

A low pinging sound approaches and Jared looks up in time to see a car taking the corner, smooth and slow, Jensen behind the wheel. Jared, not much of a gearhead, still can’t deny that Jensen’s car is pretty as a picture, bright and shiny, so slick looking that any speck of dust would probably slide right off of the thing. It’s some late model Buick, fresh out of Detroit and fresh off of the production line by the look of it. The body of the vehicle is the rich color of cream, the fenders and foot rails a deep brown, and when Jensen gets out of the car, Jared wonders if he’s matched his shoes to the color of the car or if it’s the other way around; both options seem equally plausible.

Jensen has changed from last night’s suit into a set of loose fitting pants the color of sand that Jared thinks he wears a little too low, and a pale cotton shirt rolled up to his elbows and unbuttoned at the collar. He’s got his hat in his hand, and his hair stands up in soft-looking spikes, highlighted red by the rising sun. He flips his hat onto his head with a small flourish that Jared finds endearing, despite his better judgment.

“Howdy, sunshine,” Jensen says with a finger to the brim of his hat. He circles his car and grabs Jared’s bag from the pavement, tosses it in through the open window where it lands unceremoniously in the back, then opens the door and makes a grand sweep with his hand.

“Not what I’d call inconspicuous,” Jared says as he ducks into the car.

“Hey,” Jensen says, “you should know as well as anybody that everyone’s got to give in to a few vices. I happen to have a weakness for very pretty things.” He lowers himself into the driver’s seat, shifts and squirms until he finds the right position, getting ready for the long haul. He offers Jared some coffee from his thermos, then takes a sip and hisses through his teeth at the heat of it.

“How long to get there?”

Jensen leans forward to look at the sky through the windshield like maybe the clouds hold the answer to the question. “Maybe a day to get there, half a day back.”

“Why the difference?”

“Up the hill is slower going than on the way back down, and it’s been awhile since I was last in that neck of the woods. Thought you might like it if I took you to see some of the local color.”

Jensen gets them rolling, and Jared leans back against the seat, stretches out as best he can, legs diagonal in the footwell. He keeps one eye on the sky beyond his window and the other on Jensen, who drives through the city like he was born behind the wheel, negotiating the narrow, twisting road ways as if he’s got a map of them etched into the backs of his eyelids.

Jared might have put up a bit of a fight over this venture, but his heart wasn’t really in it. It’s been two years since he was last outside of the city limits, and for the entirety of that timte, he’s lived off of coffee and catnaps and a constant dose of nervous energy, always wondering if the next person to come through the door won’t be a customer at all, but a law man with a set of handcuffs tucked into his belt.

When they pass beyond the city line, exhaustion smacks into Jared all at once. He settles into a near-doze, half listening to Jensen’s consistent monologue, all these tales of adventures and near misses that are just far-fetched enough to probably be true. It’s fair to say that he likes the sound of Jensen’s voice, the smooth timbre of it, and the way Jensen lets his mountain twang roll on out when he starts to talk real fast.

They’re in the foothills before they stop, the mountains a hazy, indistinct shape in the distance. Jensen pulls into a gas station, a real ma and pa type establishment with huge tin signs hammered onto the building advertising Valvoline and Coca-Cola, clean restrooms and Camel cigarettes. The attendant emerges from the door to the garage, wiping his greasy fingers on a rag, then nods appreciatively at Jensen’s car. Jensen hands him a couple of bucks, tells him to fill it up and keep the change.

The place is a sort of catch-all, garage and general store and diner all rolled into one. Inside, it smells like an odd combination of rubber tires and fried food. A woman stands behind the long diner counter in the back, about Jared’s age and fair, her red lipstick almost matches the bright color of her hair. She glances in their direction when the bell above the door announces their entrance, then does a double-take, her face brightening with a smile when she sees Jensen.

“Alice,” Jensen says, opening his arms to her as she circles the counter and dashes in their direction.

“Jensen Ackles,” she says, “it’s been so long that I thought you’d forgotten about us.” Alice gives Jensen a playful smack, right in the center of his chest, then throws her arms around his neck, laughing as he picks her up and twirls her around.

“Never, Alice. You are unforgettable.”

She laughs again, this time surprisingly deep and wicked, then gets them situated at the counter with steaming cups of coffee and handwritten menus. Jared’s eyeing up the glass case behind the counter, piled high with cakes and pie, and Jensen nudges him in the ribs with his elbow.

“Dessert first, huh? A man after my own heart. Try the strawberry-rhubarb. My treat. I promise you won’t regret it.”

And Jared doesn’t know what to make of any of this. He’s been ordered to keep an eye on Jensen, make sure he stays on the straight and narrow, not to let Jensen buy him pie and take him to meet old acquaintances. Now that they’re on the road together, though, much of Jensen’s cockiness has melted away, leaving a sort of genuine charm behind that Jared’s finding hard to resist.

Alice takes their orders, disappears into the back for a minute and returns with two plates entirely taken over with pie and a couple of scoops of vanilla ice cream. It turns out Jensen is right. Jared moans embarrassingly at the first bite, sweet and tart, hot and cold all at once, hands down the best thing he’s put in his mouth in a very, very long time.

As they eat, Alice comes by again and chats with Jensen about which roads are passable and which aren’t, the places Jensen’s been and the things that he’s seen, all while Jared scrapes his plate clean and seriously considers licking it once he’s done. She fills the thermos with fresh coffee, on the house, packs them up another slice of pie apiece and waves Jensen away when he tries to settle up the bill.

“Your money’s no good here,” she says. “You know that.”

He tries to talk her out of it, but she just leans over the counter and presses a kiss to the corner of Jensen’s mouth instead, and gives him one more flirty look over her shoulder before helping another customer.

“Sweet girl,” Jensen says, pulling a five-dollar bill out of his wallet anyway and folding it beneath his empty coffee cup.

“A girl in every port, huh?” Jared asks. He knows the question is leading Jensen in a certain direction, and hopes like hell he takes the bait.

Jensen produces a handkerchief from his back pocket and wipes the smudge her lipstick left behind before trailing Jared toward the door. “Not exactly.”

 

 

 

 

When they get out of the car again the air is thinner, more crisp, and each time Jared swallows his ears crackle from the elevation. Jensen had taken a fork in the road about a mile back, hit the clutch and popped he transmission into neutral, coasted downhill until the pavement turned into twin wheel ruts and finally became hardly discernable indentations in the ground.

“End of the line,” Jensen tells him, nosing the car into a space between two trees, cutting the engine and reaching across Jared to dig around in the glove compartment. He comes up with a small brown envelope, tied closed with twine. He thumbs it open and Jared isn’t surprised to find it stuffed with cash. Jensen counts out about a third of the stack before leaning over Jared again to replace it.

“That’s a hefty cut,” Jared observes. He’s never seen that much cash in his life.

“I got a lot of overhead,” Jensen says, and gets out of the car without further explanation. He walks a couple of yards away, and then looks at Jared over his shoulder. “Are you coming?”

Jared scrambles out of the car, takes a few seconds to stretch the kinks out of his back from the long hours spent shoehorned in the passenger seat. The ground beneath his feet is soft, loamy. It gives a little as he walks across it.

“The man we’re going to see is called blind Willie,” Jensen says in low tones. “Ancient as these hills all around us and cooks up the best ‘shine I’ve ever had the pleasure of tasting. Pure corn whiskey. He’s cagey though, so you just let me do all the talking.”

“Is he really blind?” Jared asks.

Jensen shakes his head. “Not completely. He’s got one mostly good eye.”

Jared pauses, peering down the path with its canopy of tree branches. At this elevation, the leaves are already starting to turn, smoky oranges and brilliant yellows that paint Jensen’s skin a warm, vital color. Jared feels a ribbon of heat uncurl low in his stomach. Looks like Jensen isn’t the only one with a weakness for very pretty things. “Really?” he says, chewing on his lips to contain his laughter. “One-eyed Willie? You gotta be joking.”

“No, and I wish I was. His still blew up on him ‘round about four years ago. Nasty piece of business that was.” Jensen stops, shades his eyes as he looks westward into the setting sun, gets his bearings and turns toward the south. “Willie staggered out of the woods with his hair still smoking. Lucky enough that it was raining that night, or half the mountain might have burned. Folks say that he went a little crazy after that. The man was already more than half the way there anyway, if you ask me.”

“That’s comforting,” Jared says.

“I live to serve.” Jensen quickens his pace. “We’re getting close,” he says, tapping the side of his nose.

Jared breathes in deep, catches the faintest hint of wood smoke in the air. Signs of humanity start to appear within a few minutes: the staves of a busted up crate rising out of the soft forest floor like bleached bones of an unearthed grave, the iron bands of a whiskey barrel left out to rust, cracked ceramic handles and the jagged mouth of a bottle stuck into the crux of a couple of tree limbs.

The trees open up to a clearing with a listing wood shack in the middle, little more than roof on poles really, made of roughly hewn boards that twist and warp. A man is hunched beneath the shelter, hovering over a set up that reminds Jared of something that HG Wells might find interesting to write about. His pants are mud-stained, hanging limply from his skinny hips, and his shirt billows around a chest so thin that it almost seems to be concave and makes his shoulders seem twice as wide. His hands are calloused, the size of dinner plates, square palms and crooked fingers, and he wears a scraggly thin beard, singed at the ends like his still blew up on him last week instead of a couple of years back. He stares at them with his one good eye, a blue that’s deeper than the sky, it’s companion clouded over white, the lid drooping and scarred. When he speaks, his accent is so thick that it takes Jared a few seconds to cotton on to what he’s saying.

“Three years in the city have turned you soft, boy. Look at you there, with your fancy shoes and your fancy shirt, thinkin’ you need a bodyguard to come on up here and see me.”

“He’s not my bodyguard,” Jensen protests, but he’s got a smile on his face, the most genuine smile that Jared’s seen out of the man yet.

“Uh-huh,” Willie clicks his tongue on the inside of his cheek. “Then who is he?”

“He’s my valet,” Jensen says dryly. “He’s here to do all the heavy lifting.”

“Suppose it’s best if I don’t know too much anyhow. Not that I’m planning on turning snitch or anything,” Willie says and then he cackles like he’s made some kind of joke.

They exchange pleasantries for a few minutes, working within the confines of some moonshiners’ code of conduct. Jensen asks how his season has been going, whether he’s had any trouble with the revenuers, they both bemoan and lay curses upon the name of the local deputy sheriff, nastier person never drew breath to hear them speak of it, and then it’s time to get to business.

“Ol’ man Willie here can tell the proof of the liquor just by looking at it,” Jensen tells Jared, and Jared nods, thinks about how everybody is good at something, and about how talents can come on all shapes and sizes.

Willie leads them over to a stack of wooden crates, slats nailed across it on the inside so that the bottles won’t clank and jostle during transport. Jensen takes a bottle from the top crate and loosens the cork, holds it under his nose while Willie looks on expectantly, shifting his weight from foot to foot and wringing his fingers. Just looking at the guy is making Jared nervous, tickling some warning sense at the base of his skull.

“It’s pure. Good. Corn mash made from my very own recipe,” Willie says.

Jensen takes a sip and barely has the bottle away from his lips before he’s spitting it out onto the ground and wiping at his mouth with this sleeve. The look he directs at the old moonshiner is dark, like he’s trying to think of a way to bring the mountain down on top of him. “Who do you think I am? Some two-bit hustler still wet behind the ears? What did you cut this stuff with? Tastes like fucking turpentine.”

Willie throws up his hands in a placating way. “I--I was just testing ya. Seeing if you still had the knack. I shoulda known that you’d see right through it. You’re a professional,” he placates. “Best in the business, you are. Just making sure you were still on your toes. Here’s the good stuff.” Willie starts rummaging around behind the still, moving a sheet of corrugated aluminum and pushing aside a medium sized boulder. He goes down on his hands and knees and digs around in the ground, lugs up a bottle about the size of a pint. “Here, try this one on for size.”

Jensen, suspicious, holds the bottle up to his nose and takes a cautious sip, licks his lips then grunts.

“Good, isn’t it? Real good, first run from a still I have a mile or two from here, and plenty more where this came from. Come back tomorrow and I’ll--”

Jensen carefully replaces the cap on the bottle and slips it into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Tomorrow,” he says with a shake of his head. “You’ve already wasted enough of my time. No way in hell I’m letting you waste any more of it.”

Jared stands there for a moment, mouth open and staring back and forth between the two of them, then scrambles to follow Jensen.

As they’re hiking away from the still, Jensen mutters, “The people I can trust in the business are few and far between. A very short list, and damned if it didn’t just get a little shorter.”

They make it back to the car, all of Jensen’s mirth and good humor completely wiped away. The sun is a bright disc low on the mountain ridge, premature shadows falling across the road.

Jensen leans against the hood of his car, takes a long pull on the bottle, his throat working as he swallows. The liquor leaves a wet sheen on Jensen’s lips, a pink flush to his face, high along his cheekbones. He passes the bottle over to Jared.

“I thought you said this stuff would kill you,” Jared says, chiding, before taking a sip. It’s strong, burns his throat on the way down and settles warm in his stomach.

“I’ve been known to make an exception when the situation warrants.”

The booze is good, packs a punch that’s damn near anesthetic, leaves Jared’s mouth tingling and his tongue mildly numb.

Jared’s a fixer by nature, and not at all happy with this downswing in Jensen’s mood. "We can go back to the shop," he suggests. "Probably get there a little after midnight. There's a spare room above the pharmacy. It's small, only half the size of mine, but it’s got a bed in it that's comfortable enough. It'll give you a few days to find another contact, maybe build that list up some. Give you enough time to find another job."

"No, Jared," Jensen says with a distinct shake of his head. He gets into the car, and Jared’s obliged to do the same. Jensen takes another knock off of the bottle and stretches backward across the seat. Jared can smell the leftover traces of his cologne and the distinct scent of Jensen's skin beneath it, and the liquor must have taken hold of him quickly, because he wants to lean into Jensen, bury his nose in the spot where Jensen's neck meets his shoulder and figure out what he tastes like. Instead, he digs his fingers into the meat of his thighs and brings himself in check. Jensen raps his knuckles on the seat back behind him, and Jared can feel the reverberation when it comes loose. He drops the bottle into a hidden compartment and latches it closed again.

"No," Jensen repeats, getting squared in his seat again, shoving the key in the ignition and flipping the switch. He pulls in a deep breath, chest expanding and pulling at the buttons on his shirt, lets it out in an explosive rush of air. "I'm not gonna go back with my tail between my legs. As much as I appreciate the offer, I'm not gonna take any handouts."

Jared feels like he's getting to see another side of Jensen; the man who has doubts, someone who doesn't always have all the answers on the tip of his tongue with a wry smile and a heavy dose of sarcasm. But just as fast, Jensen's calm mask reasserts itself and he grins at Jared, nothing but mischief through and through.

"You have a better idea?" Jared asks, a little wary.

"One thing you need to know about me is that _always_ have a back up plan, and in most cases, a second or a third. With enough luck and careful planning, one of them might even work out."

"There you go with luck again," Jared says. "Well, the law of averages states that something has to work out eventually."

"And everybody's a comedian," Jensen says under his breath. He thumbs the headlights, weak and yellow against the gathering darkness, grinds the car into gear for effect and plots a course back down the mountain.

“How did you wind up doing this, anyway?” Jared asks.

“I found myself at a crossroad of misfortune, you could say. How does anyone end up doing anything?”

 

 

 

“Smells like rain,” Jensen says, and leans forward to peer at the sky through the windshield. “Looks like it too.”

He’s coasting, downshifting and pumping the brakes around the close-angle turns, and Jared’s holding his breath in the passenger seat, hands balled into fists although everything in him is telling him to find something in the car to hold onto. Negotiating switchbacks is bad enough in the day, twice worse at night, and Jared doesn’t even want to think of the possibilities that open up once the road gets wet and slick.

“We should find a place to stay for the night,” Jared says, “and something warm to eat.” His stomach feels like it’s sticking to his backbone.

“Don’t reckon the Waldorf-Astoria has branched out into this neck of the woods,” Jensen replies. “It’s mostly mining towns for the next hundred miles. Hey, speaking of...”

They’re coming up on a few rows of houses, identical shacks really, evenly spaced apart on the muddy street. Theirs is the only car on the road, none parked in front of the homes. A few have electricity, bare bulbs hanging from sparse main rooms, shining through windows without curtains.

"Company housing," Jensen says without being asked. "The people here all work for the mining company. Live in the houses the company gives them. They don't get paid except in company vouchers, which can only be spent at the company store, and the store charges two bucks for a pound of sugar."

"Doesn’t hardly seem legal,” Jared says, rubbing his sleeve on the foggy window.

"It is, though. How I don't know. Makes you think about a lot of stuff. I mean, even indentured servants were given a fair hand when their time was through. Folks here can work a lifetime and have nothing at all to show for it."

A set of train tracks cut through the center of the neighborhood, the road rising up slightly to meet them, and as the tires of the car thump over iron rails, Jared tells Jensen to slow down.

“See that?” he says, pointing at the first in a line of telegraph poles that run parallel to the tracks. Someone has carved a circle with an X in the center into the wood, and fairly recently by the look of it.

Jensen squints into the night, angles his body toward Jared and bends his elbow over the steering wheel. “What is that?”

“It means that there’s someone ahead who will welcome travelers to their supper table. It’s a hobo sign.” When Jensen gives him a doubtful look, Jared continues. “There’s this jungle back home, on the edge of town. A hobo camp,” he clarifies. “Jim sometimes sends me down there with medicine. I’ve picked up a few things over time.”

They clear the town, roll down a road so dark that the headlights on the car hardly make a dent. A mile or so along, they come across a clapboard house, sitting canted on the hillside, busted up staircase no wider than a ladder leading up to a porch that's on its last legs.

Jensen pulls over and cuts the engine. “Looks like the place.”

A single flame is lit in one of the front windows. Some things are universal, it turns out. Light a candle in the window; come one, come all.

“Do you think they’ll have a telephone?” Jared asks. He’s thinking about Jim and Misha, Lily and Kate, and how no one knows where he is or that his homecoming is going to be delayed.

“Hell, kiddo. Most of the houses around here don’t even have any running water. Ma Bell hasn’t paid any of these people a visit.” After the initial riser lists and makes him pinwheel his arms to regain his balance, Jensen says, "First step's a real doozy." He knocks on the door and a shadow of a face peeks through the window.

The door opens and they're greeted with the business end of a shotgun pointed at chest level. Immediately, they both shuffle a step backward and throw their hands up, palms forward.

"Just accepting your invitation," Jared says quickly, putting on his most disarming smile. "No harm intended." He tracks the line of the barrel to get a good look at the man behind it. He might have been tall once, maybe even as tall as Jared, but his back is bent now. His face is deeply lined, and at first Jared thinks that he's somewhat older, perhaps creeping up on sixty or better, but the sandy colored hair taken over by only a small amount of grey at the temples tells the truth. He's probably not a day over thirty-five. Coal dust has crept into the lines on his face, etched across his forehead and around his mouth. A deeper stain of it has collected right underneath his nose, and Jared feels a pang of sadness so deep it's downright staggering. If this is what the man looks like on the outside, there's no telling what he might look like on the inside.

As if to prove his point, the man turns and hacks into the bend of his elbow, produces a filthy rag from his back pocket and spits into it.

"Sorry, gentlemen," he says, propping the shotgun beside the door jamb. "Can't be too careful nowadays."

"Understandable," Jensen says, then reaches down to pat the strawberry blonde hair of a young girl who's sneaking around her father’s leg, small hand clutching at his pant leg.

“We ran into some trouble up in the hills,” Jared says. It’s not the truth, but it’s not entirely a lie either. Before Jared is even partially through his internal moral compromise, the man is ushering them inside and toward the table.

“The less I know, the better,” he says, then introduces himself as Henry, Hank if you’re of a mind. His wife’s name is Sally and the best damn cook on this side of the mountain as well as the other.

The house is one room big, a pot bellied stove used for cooking and heat tucked into one corner. A single wide bed sits in the corner opposite, uneven and lumpy mattress covered with a stack of patchwork quilts. In a flash Jared feels a sort of shame that runs bone deep, over the self-pity he feels every time he thinks about how little Jim pays him, or the way that he’d been so angry back when he found out that he’d be sharing a room with another student at the university when he’d been guaranteed a single dormitory.

Everything is homemade or homespun, with only a few exceptions, from the blocky table that the men are shown toward, to the curtains on the windows and the rag rug beneath their feet. Jensen starts to pull his flask out of his pocket to offer to Hank and Jared stops him with an elbow to the ribs, silently indicating the rough hewn cross above the bed.

Instead, Hank pours water for them from a ceramic pitcher into canning jars with the company store stamp on the bottom.

“Please, if there’s anyway that I can repay you,” Jared says when Sally places a large bowl of stew in front of each of them. The broth is watery and thin, root vegetables float to the surface and it’s flavored with some stringy, gamey meat. The corn bread is exceptional though, thick and moist. Hank pushes a tub of soft white cheese over toward, and it makes Jared’s mouth flood with saliva and his stomach grumble happily.

The rest of the family joins them, Hank tapping his son’s arms when the kid puts his elbows up on the table with a muttered, “We have guests. Straighten up and act right.”

“No need to repay us,” Sally tells them. “We’re just doing our part. Things are rough all over.”

“We do alright for ourselves,” Hank agrees. “We got a few chickens out back, sell the eggs when ends don’t quite meet, or my little girl there wants a new ribbon from the Sears catalog. Couple of goats out there, too,” he says, and Jared now knows where the cheese comes from. “Sally picks up some mending from time to time. It all adds up.”

Jared takes Sally up on her offer of a second bowl of stew, but turns down a third. Jensen has done little more than pick at his food, silent and sullen at Jared's elbow, but he's quick to stand when everyone is done, carry the plates and bowls over to the wash basin, roll his sleeves up and get to work.

Jared watches Jensen's back as he helps Sally with the dishes, stacks them neatly and takes a dish towel to them. His head is bent toward her in quiet conversation, and the oldest girl keeps sneaking surreptitious, flirty glances in Jensen's direction. Hank pulls out a pipe and some tobacco, hacks his way through getting the thing lit, then sits back, fragrant smoke filling the room.

The littlest kid has a cough like his daddy. Jared’s seen this before. It’s not only the miner that pays the price from breathing in coal dust day in and day out. They carry it home on their clothes, and when he was at school, he saw a lot of cases of children with the black lung, whole families coming down with the stuff. Sally scoots the kid over to the bed, lifts him up with her hands tucked underneath his arms and digs around in a tin cupboard to produce a small bottle and a spoon.

“Wait a minute,” Jared says, crossing the room and taking the bottle from her. He holds it up in front of a lit candle, ignoring the label and swirling it.

“A man came through the town,” Sally says, “selling this to all the mining families. Said it’s supposed to help with the cough.” Out of the side of her mouth she continues, “I can’t get Hank to take it, he says it’s snake oil, but I have to do something.”

Jared opens the small bottle and sniffs at it, puts a drop of it on his finger and tastes it. Patent medicine, and from experience Jared knows that a lot of these contain alarmingly high percentages of mercury, poisonous if taken over a long period of time. He crosses the room and opens her pantry. “How old is he?” Jared asks.

“He’ll be three soon, the week before Thanksgiving,” Sally tells him.

Jared nods, digging through her cupboard and inspecting labels. “So no honey,” he says, mostly to himself. “Molasses will do, though.” He comes across some oil, safflower by the the dark yellow tint that it holds, and puts it on the counter beside him. A string of peppers hangs in front of one of the windows in the westward facing wall, skinny little red fingers that are wrinkled and dry. “Do you have a mortar and pestle?” Jared asks.

The woman shakes her head, so Jared grabs a rolling pin instead, crumples up a couple of the peppers and carefully removes the seeds. Jensen stays close to his back, a somewhat suspicious but mostly curious look on his face. “Make yourself useful,” Jared says. “Crush these with the rolling pin. Try and make it as powdery as you can.”

“What’s all this?” Jensen asks, but he takes the pin and leans his weight into it, rolling it back and forth until he’s ground it into a fine powder, less than a teaspoon full, but plenty enough to suit Jared’s purposes.

“Kitchen medicine,” Jared says with a wink, and then he pours a generous amount of molasses into a thick copper-bottomed pan, checks the fire in the stove and adds another length of wood to get it nice and hot. He adds the oil, stirs it until the molasses starts to spit up small bubbles and the oil gets incorporated. The concoction needs an acid, and Jared casts around the kitchen. There’s no citrus to be found, but he does turn up with a bottle of vinegar. “Apple vinegar?” he asks Sally and she nods, says she made it herself. A couple of spoonfuls of that go in as well, a bitter smelling steam erupting from that pot and making Jared’s eyes water for a second. He tests the crushed peppers, working a pinch of them between his fingers to check the consistency, and satisfied, puts a few pinches of that into the syrup, then takes the wooden spoon, coats it and watches the slow stream of it run back into the pot. Finding a mason jar, he lets the stuff run slowly from the pot to the jar, letting it cool on the way down. The final product is a deep red color, thick and viscous.

“You can skip the snake oil next time,” Jared says. “This stuff is cheaper to make. It’ll probably work better, too.”

As if on cue, the kid begins coughing again, tiny fist held in front of his mouth just like his momma taught him, and Jared takes a spoon and measures some out, testing the temperature and taste of it with his pinky finger. He feeds the boy a spoonful and the cough is immediately quieted.

“When you run out of this, skip the vinegar and see if you can get some lemons instead. Lemon juice would be best, helps the tickle in his throat, and the kid would probably like it more that way.”

“Are you a doctor?” Sally asks, taking the bottle from Jared’s hand and sniffing at it.

“No, ma’am. Not exactly.”

That earns him a sharp look from Jensen, but he ignores it. Instead, Jared finds a pencil and a slip of paper to write the recipe down for the cough syrup, while Jensen and Hank talk about his work at the mine, groan over the wicked ways of the foreman, and the increasingly tricky schemes of the big bosses.

It's curious. Jensen seems just as at home here in the middle of nowhere as he would be in some fancy hotel restaurant, confident movements as he takes a bucket out to the pump outside and fills it with water, then heats it to steaming on top of the rounded, pot belly stove. He's a dichotomy; so forthcoming in a lot of ways, and lord knows get him on a roll and he won't shut up, but he's awfully closemouthed in a lot of ways too. Seeing how he acts right now makes Jared wonder where he grew up, and more so, _how_ he grew up.

Jared's a city boy through and through, doesn't know the first thing about priming a pump or the twisted way that mining companies work, doesn’t think that he’d make it through a week without electricity. Hell, he gets more than a little irritable if he doesn't get a bath at least every other day. His feet are built for city streets, paved sidewalks and everything he could possibly need or want or have to have within a few blocks or a quick ride on the trolley.

"Morning comes early around here," Hank says, finishing his pipe and tapping it out onto the plank floor. He crushes out the cinder with the heel of one blocky boot. "We've got a shed out back, and you two are welcome to stay. Might not be what you’re used to,” Hank says, “but it’ll keep the rain off. Sally, get these boys--"

Jared interrupts him. "We don't want to take advantage of your hospitality. You and your family have done plenty."

Sally comes up behind her husband, puts her hands on his shoulders and gives him a soft squeeze. She smiles, and suddenly Jared can see the young woman she once was, before her lot in life had a chance to take its toll. It makes his heart lurch in his chest. She was beautiful once, still is in a lot of ways.

She tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "If we've done plenty, then it wouldn't hurt to do a little more." She snaps her fingers at her eldest daughter. "Honey, grab the lantern and get the blankets out of the chest."

The girl does as she's told, lights a match and sets it to the wick of the lantern, holds it high as she leads them to the back, through the churned dirt of the goat pen. The land rises up steeply behind their property, the slope dotted with evergreen trees that appear black against the dark sky. The moon is not showing, just a faint glow hidden behind the heavy cloud cover, and a stiff cold breeze pulls at Jared’s clothes. Very far up the hill, a spark can be seen, some wayward travelers’ campfire.

“The Ohio railroad runs through those hills,” the girl explains, her features delicate and pale, ghost-like in the shuttered light of the lantern. “A tunnel cuts through the mountain up there, and the train has to slow down some before it goes through, or at least it always does. We get a lot of people who take that chance to jump off. They stick around sometimes. Sometimes stay a few days, and we feed them if they come down this far.”

“The hobo sign, and the candle in the window,” Jensen says.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

The shed clears the ground by a couple of inches, raised up on cinderblocks all around, and the planks beneath their feet creak and give when they enter. The place has a damp, earthy smell to it, underlined by machine oil and rust, but it’s dry. A bunk with a lumpy straw-filled mattress has been built into one corner, big enough for a man if he’s about half a foot shorter than Jared.

“There’s a latch on the inside and another on the outside of the door, if you’re worried about someone walking in on you.” She pauses at the doorway, passes a weighted look from one of them to the other.

“Sweetheart,” Jensen starts, his tone carefully even, “what exactly are you saying?”

“I’m sorry. I thought,” she stutters, eyes as big as saucers. “It's the way you are around each other. Thought you'd known each other for years.”

"Years?" Jensen says. "You're off by a fraction. We've known each other a couple of days is all."

The girl ducks her head, hair falling loose around her face. "Sorry. I...I thought you were used to spending a lot of time just the two of you, is all."

"Don't worry about it," Jared says, trying to put the girl at ease. "No harm done." Rain drops start to fall, pinging on the tin roof of the shack. "You better get to bed. Run along now, before you get too wet."

The glow from her lantern has barely disappeared around the front of the house when the sky opens up, slamming against the roof of the shed in a deafening way, the temperature dropping faster than a stone. A drip starts from the eaves, and quickly turns into a steady stream, running an inch away from Jensen's shoulder and he moves fast, bumping into Jared.

“A little bit of water won’t kill you,” Jared says. There’s a whole bunch of awkward in the room right now, and Jared’s trying to find a way to skate around it.

Jensen grunts his response, asks, "Who gets the bed?"

"We could flip for it."

"Fair enough." Jensen digs around in his pocket for a coin. "I call heads," he says and flips it.

Jared wins the coin toss, and Jensen bargains for the best two out of three.

With a sigh, Jared says, "I'm willing to share if you are."

Jensen eyes the bed doubtfully, seems to consider it, and finally lands on an answer. "Having to fight your knobby knees and sharp elbows all night long?"

"It's still more comfortable than the floor."

Jensen grumbles, something about Jared being smart-mouthed , then takes his hat off, tosses it onto a shelf, and scritches his fingers across his scalp, making his hair stand up in soft whorls. He shrugs out of his suspenders, lets them fall around his thighs, turns his back to Jared and pulls his shirt over his head.

In the dark, the white of Jensen’s undershirt is a sharp contrast to the color of his skin. Jared sits on the edge of the bed, picks open the laces on his shoes, and stares openly at Jensen’s back. He feels nailed down by the sight, stuck on the smooth shift of Jensen’s shoulders as he carefully folds his shirt, and the curl of Jensen’s spine and the graceful arch of his neck as Jensen’s steps out of first his shoes and then his trousers.

The cot is small, barely enough to fit one of them much less both, and there are a few long minutes of compromise as Jared shoves himself as far against wall as he can go and Jensen wriggles in beside him. They fight with blankets and space, and Jared's about to make the argument about whose knees are knobbier and whose elbows are sharper before Jensen shifts and their bodies seem to lock into place, Jensen's shoulder notched under Jared's arm and Jensen's hips slotted against his own.

The rain ends as abruptly as it had started, leaving a huge silence in its wake. A vacuum of noise after the thunderous downpour, punctuated by the lonesome sound of a train whistle wailing in the distance, and the soft, steady rhythm of Jensen’s breath a mere couple of inches away.

"This might be my last run."

The news comes as a surprise to Jared, as does the slowed seriousness of Jensen's tone as he says it. "Why's that?" he asks.

"Well, it's either you or me, and it seems to me that my luck has taken a very southwardly turn as of late. It's a fifty-fifty shot that this will work out the way I want it to, and I'm not too keen on those kinda odds."

"What will you do if you're not doing this?"

It's dark, close, the air heavy with humidity but still chilly. "I think I'll start riding the rails. Become a genuine train-hopping hobo like the folks you were talking about. Stow away on the first train that comes through town and see where I end up."

"What'll you do when you get there?"

Jensen yawns hugely, big enough that Jared can hear his jaw pop. "Catch the next one," he says, the words slurring together.

“And after that?”

“Who am I kidding? I couldn’t quit. It’s the only goddamn thing I know how to do,” Jensen says.

“I’m sure that’s not true,” Jared says, but he knows he’s close to losing Jensen to sleep. Jensen simply hums, mutters something that Jared can’t quite decipher. He squirms a little closer to Jared, and Jared allows it, kinda likes the slow rise and fall of Jensen’s chest against his arm and the soft brush of air on his neck every time Jensen exhales.

Sleep is slow coming. Jared fills up long minutes counting backward from one hundred, and when that doesn’t do the trick, occupies himself with conjugating every Latin verb he can remember, then moves on to naming the bones in the human body, from phalanges to cranium and back down again. He’s half-way through counting the thoracic vertebrae when Jensen reaches out and places his hand in the center of his chest, right over his heart.

“You alright?” Jensen asks, groggy and mostly asleep.

“Yeah, I’m okay. You?”

Jensen doesn’t answer, simply pats Jared’s chest then curls his fingers in Jared’s undershirt.

Jared shifts, snakes an arm around Jensen’s shoulders and pulls him even closer, flush against his body. He doesn’t look too closely at the reasons for it, tells himself it’s to ward off the cold. The cot is too short, ends about mid-calf on Jared and he knows that his feet are going to be numb, no better than blocks of ice come morning, but right now he’s hard pressed to be concerned with that. Jensen is beside him, pliant, an absolute perfect fit in a million different ways, and Jared hasn’t been this comfortable in his skin in a very, very long time.

 

 

 

 

Morning comes way too early, a peculiar, red-colored dawn slings in through the cracks in the slats that make up the walls of the shed. Jared slits one eye open, and finds himself nose to nose with the splintering wood wall, unable to move. He’s got the mother of all cricks in his neck and his feet are predictably without feeling. It’s freezing, the kind of wet cold that seeps into a person’s bones, and Jared can see small white clouds puff out in front of him with each exhale.

His surroundings reassert themselves gradually; the crossbeam of the cot is digging into his hip so hard he’s probably coming up bruised, and the same can be said for his shin about half way down. Jared is mildly surprised that he and Jensen didn’t jostle each other out of the cot last night, but Jensen is pressed all along his back, knees bent in the same precise angle as Jared’s, one arm slung across Jared’s ribs and his hand is covering Jared’s own, their fingers lightly tangled together. His mouth is pressed along the back of Jared’s neck and when he breathes, it tickles the short hair there.

Jared likes the feel of it, thinks he could get used to waking up every morning exactly like this. Could get used to it real fast, in fact. Waking Jensen up at this moment is the last thing he wants to do, he wants to soak up Jensen’s warmth for just a little while longer, listen to the sounds of the world starting to wake up around him, the chattering of the birds and the scritch-scratch of wildlife in the woods right outside the door.

Perhaps it’s the change in his breathing, or some other sort of sixth sense, but Jensen shifts behind him, sliding his hand from Jared’s own and back to Jared’s hip, palm cupped exactly right over the jut of Jared’s hip bone. His fingers work reflexively, squeeze into Jared’s flesh with a sleepy, sluggish rhythm. He moves slightly, rolls his hips against Jared’s ass, and that’s when Jared realizes that Jensen is hard, rigid line of his cock nudging at him.

There’s nothing purposeful or even vaguely conscious about it, but Jared’s body responds in kind anyway, a slow ribbon of heat building in Jared’s groin, his cock starting to wake up and take note of the proceedings, and Jared closes his eyes and tries to will it back down, slip back into a doze so that he won’t be held accountable for the things his body is doing, just like Jensen isn’t accountable for the way his nose pressing against the back of Jared’s neck is driving Jared slowly crazy, making him shiver and want. It’s been so long. So, _so_ long since he’s felt the scratch of a man’s beard against his skin, since he’s breathed in that particular smell of another man, all sweat with the clean scent of skin underneath.

They’re both under the same stack of blankets, even though they had started out separate last night. Jared vaguely remembers Jensen, groggy and in complete darkness, pulling and tugging at the blankets last night with some instinctive, mammalian drive to be warmer. But now there’s nothing separating them, not space and barely clothes. Jared can feel where his shirt’s come untucked from his trousers, and is excruciatingly aware of the touch of Jensen’s bare stomach to the small of his back.

Jensen moves behind him again, a little closer to consciousness this time. He stretches in his sleep, cold nose nuzzling against Jared’s neck and the slide of his cock along Jared’s ass more insistent now, and Jared resists the drive to push back onto him, or more accurately, roll over and push Jensen onto his back, test his theory about how well he would fit into the vee of Jensen’s legs. Maybe try out a few other theories besides, because Jared’s willing to bet dollars to donuts that Jensen’s lips are as soft as they look, and his hands just as rough as his mouth is soft. Jared can imagine the way he’d flex and squirm under Jared, grit his teeth until he couldn’t hold back any more, then let Jared’s name stutter off of his tongue.

Slowly, so slowly, Jared skates his hand down his own body, cupping his crotch but not going any further than that, nothing outside of a constant pressure to attempt to soothe the ache. His cock is thick against his thigh, pulse a sonic boom in his ears, and he wants to kiss Jensen more than anything, kiss him until they are both breathless and stupid with it.

He’s about to do something, something drastic that he’ll probably live to regret, rationalizing, trying to convince himself that it wouldn’t matter at all, not one lick, because he never has to see Jensen again if he doesn’t want to, and if Jensen decides to abandon him here, it would be difficult to get home but not impossible, and suddenly a rooster calls so loudly that for one single disorienting instant, Jared actually believes that the thing is sitting on his shoulder and crowing into his ear, like some demented version of Poe’s prophetic raven.

“God,” Jensen says, and Jared shivers at the chill that swoops in to replace the warmth of Jensen all along his back. “Fuck,” he continues in an almost conversational tone. “Ten minutes. I need just ten more minutes.” The rooster calls again. “I’m going to strangle that fucking bird,” he says, still calm and even, “and then I’m going to strangle it again.” He stretches, arches his back into a steep curve, then rubs his nose along Jared’s neck and clings a little tighter to Jared’s hip before he lets go.

“So you’re one of those people,” Jared notes, struggling to flip over and face Jensen. “The kind that ain’t hardly human before noon.”

“No, I’m human alright. I fucking hate roosters is all.” Jensen stretches again, arms above his head and one hand grasping the wrist of the other, then starts a ten second countdown out loud. He reaches one and tosses the blankets off of himself, hops out of bed and starts jumping back and forth from one foot to the other, his bare feet cold on the bare floor. Jared uses the opportunity to gather the covers on top of himself, hides the way he palms at his cock by feigning a stretch.

“Long day ahead of us. We’ll make it to the state line today if we’re lucky.” Jensen tucks his shirt into his pants and makes quick business of his suspenders, and Jared discovers that watching Jensen get dressed is nearly as intimate as watching him get out of his clothes. Jared yawns massively, brushes his fingers through his hair and tries to make something of the knots and pulls his clothes on.

Outside, Sally and the little boy slog through the mud, spreading feed out for the chickens and goats. The hem of Sally's dress is black with mud and her shoes are caked with it, and the little boy has a streak of it on his cheek and a matching one on his forehead. Sally's fresh-faced, however, clean washed shin and a warm smile.

"The medicine worked," she tells Jared as soon as they emerge from the shack. "I can't remember the last time I was able to sleep through the night with him. There aren’t enough thanks in the world."

Jared grins at her, tousles the kid's hair until it's standing in messy corkscrews. "I suppose that goes both ways, ma'am," he says.

Breakfast is bacon and eggs fried in the grease, huge slabs of bread toasted on top of the oven and smothered with strawberry preserves from Sally's pantry. They're given large cups of coffee, strong and black and almost thick as mud, and Jared's not sure if it strips what little hair he has on his chest or adds to it.

"Where you gentlemen off to now?" Hank asks as he pushes himself back from the table and bends himself in half to pull his boots on and lace them up. Jared has a suspicion that he's been in the cough syrup himself, since he seems well rested too, and the hacking seems to have lessened from last night.

"North," Jensen says evasively.

"Like I said last night," Hank says, "the less I know about you two the better."

"We could give you a lift to work if you'd like."

Hank thanks them but waves it off. "I enjoy the walk. That twenty minutes of my day is often the only peace and quiet I'll ever get."

These people have a kindness to them, a generosity that Jared isn’t accustomed to, and he thinks it because they have so little in the first place. Sally sends them off with small pecks to their cheeks and a paper sack containing bacon sandwiches and a couple of bottles of coke that she had squirreled away, and before Jensen rises from the breakfast table, he slides three twenty dollar bills under his plate.

Jared rolls down the window once they’re on the road again. The road is better on the far side of town, even pavement and cut into the hill, straight sheets of slate on either side of the car that rise up to dizzying heights. If Jared looks close enough, he can see the holes that the road workers bored into the solid bedrock of the mountain, map the blasts that took place years ago when these roadways were being constructed.

"I've been wondering something," Jared starts, and Jensen glances at him sideways, one eyebrow raised up in curiosity. "Why didn't they just go around the mountain? You know, when they were building this road?"

"It's a metaphor," Jensen explains. "People have always wanted to show some sort of domination over nature. Show Mother Nature who’s boss, I suppose you could say. So they blast through the mountain. Besides, I think that people like to operate in straight lines."

"You say people like you're not really a part of it. How about you?"

"I like to think that I'm a little bit crooked."

"Or a lot."

"Maybe."

  

 

They stop, partially because Jared needs to piss and partially because Jensen really likes the view, a drawbridge in the distance and a small creek cut into the land, steep banks at this spot right here where the creek twists. Rocks underneath the surface churn the water and turn it into foam. On the opposite bank, a couple of boys are picking up stones and slinging them into the water. They're out of their shirts, suntanned skinny torsos, wiry muscle stretching and bending as they toss rock after rock into the water. Their competition quickly escalates into a wrestling match, and Jared can hear the faraway sound of their laughter rising above the rush of the water.

Jared and Jensen stand there, hands in their pockets and taking in the view.

It's Jensen who finally breaks the silence. "I was seventeen the first time I left home. Seventeen years old and I'd never been off of that mountain. A relation of my mother came for a visit, some distantly related cousin twice removed or something. And he put me in this car of his. Damn thing rattled so badly I thought it was gonna break loose of its fittings before we ever made it to sea level. Seventeen years old and I'd never had a new pair of shoes." Jensen curls his tongue against his canine tooth thoughtfully. "Never had a shirt that my mother didn't make. You know, one that came from a store?”

"You seem to have turned out alright," Jared says, running his fingers along the neckline of Jensen's vest, testing the soft slip of the silk lining between his thumb and first finger.

"It's mostly for show," Jensen says, knocking his hand away. "Gotta look the part, right? Anyway, here we are and he's gonna take me to the city for the first time. New York," Jensen clarifies. "Never knew there were so many people in the world. Pretty girls everywhere in their fancy clothes and all." Jensen clears his throat before going on. "We came to this bridge, the one right outside Kingston."

Jared nods along, even though he's unfamiliar. A bridge is a bridge, as far as he's concerned, and anyhow, he's pretty sure that isn't the point. He's starting to wonder what exactly Jensen’s point is, and where all of this is coming from.

"And we stopped at the side of the road, some little shack that served oysters, seafood, something. Here I am, just some stupid kid, and we were sitting on this dock eating soft crab sandwiches and looking over the water, and I said the stupidest thing. Water so foggy that you could hardly see across and I asked my cousin if that was the ocean. Goddamn Hudson River and I thought it was the ocean. Never seen so much water in my life."

Jared’s watching Jensen carefully, starting to make a job out of doing exactly that. Some people's worlds are so very small, he knows that, but he’s having trouble reconciling this younger version of Jensen he’s now learning about with the man who is now standing beside him . "Certainly you'd read about the Atlantic. Or maybe known someone who had seen it."

Jensen fixes Jared with a dark look, and immediately Jared wishes he could take it back.

"There never were too many books around the house. We had a bible, sure, but that was just because one of those people from Gideon's made it through the neighborhood, going door to door and giving them away. My mother never was one to turn down something that came for free. She taught me how to read outta old copies of the Sears Roebuck catalog."

"Sorry. I didn’t mean…" Jared trails off, squeezing Jensen’s shoulder. It could be his imagination, some wicked bout of wishful thinking, but it seems like he feels Jensen's muscles relax some under his hand.

"Don't be. Anyway," Jensen continues, "I remember my cousin sat there for a very long time, and he laughed and laughed. Laughed so long that I thought he might never stop, and I made a promise to myself, right then and there. My folks were like Hank and Sally and those poor saps that we saw living in that town, and I made myself a promise that I wasn't going to be like them. That I'd move to some city. That I’d go as far as my two feet and those four wheels would take me."

"Seems to me that you've made good on that."

"Maybe, but then I come back here and..." Jensen trails off.

"And you start to wonder how far you’ve really gotten."

"That about sums it up."

Jensen stoops, knees spread wide to keep his balance. Jared watches as he squints across the water at the boys. They each have a line in the creek now, and one of them makes a whoop as the taller of the two leans back and reels in the fishing line. A silvery flash breaks above the churning surface and then drops back into it, and just as quickly, the other boy grabs a net and scoops it up. They get the hook out and walk a ways up the bank to put it in a wicker basket.

"Good spot," Jensen says, leading the conversation into a hairpin turn. "Wish we had more time. I'd throw a line in myself."

"I've never been fishing," Jared admits, and Jensen stands and spins on him, his chance to be incredulous.

"You're a red-blooded American man and you've never been fishing?"

"My folks always sent me to buy seafood from the docks. And between the drugstore and the bar, it’s not like I really get a day off.” Jared shrugs. “This is the first vacation I’ve had in years."

"This is a vacation?” Jensen says, followed by a harsh bark of laughter. He looks at Jared, eyes wide in disbelief, sunlight sparking gold inside all of the green, and it’s right then that Jared’s sure he’s sinking fast. He doesn’t stand a chance.

“Unbelievable,” Jensen continues. “That's it. If we make it through all of this in one piece, we're going."

They start back to the car, slipping and sliding on the steep bank.

"Don't be so hard on yourself," Jared says with a gentle shove to Jensen’s shoulder. "I'm all book learning, clears as day. But you can't learn everything from a book."

  

 

 

 

It's a real nice place. A quality establishment with white cloth on the table and real napkins forks made of actual silver. Most of the men are wearing suits and ties, the women with feathers stuck in the ribbons in their hair and everything is just so. They’d crossed the border into Virginia on their way to New York an hour ago, and Jensen had convinced Jared that this was a cause for celebration, or at least a cause to stop and get some supper at this joint that Jensen said served the best lobster south of the Mason-Dixon line.

They're served water in cut crystal glasses with lemon wedges floating on the surface, and Jared kind of wishes for something maybe a little bit stronger, but this place is legal, or at least it is on the surface. The bar is empty, barren shelves behind the register, except for a few straggling bottles of seltzer water anyway, dust on their lightning stoppers, and for the first time, Jared feels a small pang of homesickness.

Jared heads toward the back, past the polished dance floor and tiny stage, an abandoned microphone sitting in the middle and the electric lights dark. It's a narrow hallway and a group of people have congregated there, milling around a locked door and Jared can read that as easily as he reads the morning paper. Maybe the place isn’t on the up and up after all.

None of his business, though. He pushes past the door to the men's room and it's an affair to match the rest of the place. Deep basins and chrome fixtures, and a man sitting on a bench, ready to hand over a towel and a fancy selection of toiletries and all you have to do is hand him over a nickel for his time and effort. A racket if Jared's ever seen one, but Jared wants to dig the dirt out from underneath his fingernails, and everybody has a job to do, not this man's fault his is so very strange, so there you have it.

On the way back out, he slides past a woman, a pretty little thing if his tastes were to run in that direction. Curvy hips and her mouth painted a wicked shade of red that matches her dress, all bright and glittering and lit up like a roman candle. Without a thought, he touches her shoulder as she's about to back into him, mutters a quiet, "Pardon me, ma'am," and makes to dodge her

But the woman doesn't stop, and she basically falls against him, which is no surprise since the shoes she has on her feet don't make much sense at all, and then she's gasping and trying contain an embarrassed little squawk as Jared puts a hand to her back to stop this from turning into something that will really turn everyone's face red. Before he can count from one to two, Jared gets yanked violently from behind, hears a pissed off male sound that seems better suited to an ape than a bipedal primate, and a new set of hands is shoving him backward with a harmless punch to Jared's chest that does no damage whatsoever and only serves to piss him off worse.

Jared finds himself with his back against the wall and with a red-faced man looming in front of him, eyes flashing fire and it's almost comical, the way the guy's collar seems to tighten the more pissed off he gets. The music has stopped on a sour note in the background and people are starting to make room, circle around Jared like bullies on a playground.

Here he's a stranger, and that's something that he's unaccustomed to. He's used to people who know him, who wouldn't think twice about a hand on the small of their back, a small peck on the cheek or a little pointless flirting. He's out of his element, and starts to make an excuse, eat crow and make an apology although he knows he's not at fault. But then the woman touches the man's arm, all rational thinking and mollifying expression, and maybe the man doesn't know it's her, or maybe he's a little too close to the bottom of a bottle himself, but he shoves her back roughly, elbow to the center of her skinny, bird-like chest, making her stagger and cough and really shout this time, and then it's on.

Jared's vision narrows down as his heart kicks up a notch. The guy's got his hands up, shifting his weight from foot to foot and almost dancing, like he fancies himself some Irish prizefighter. The one good thing about several years of medical training is that Jared has learned how to inflict maximum damage with minimal effort. He shifts his weight and goes after the guy with a swift kick to the center of his chest that knocks him off balance immediately, sends his arms cartwheeling and his feet tripping over one another. He lands in the arms of another man, who sets him square again and shoves him back into the fray, but the wind must have been knocked out of him, and his bell has clearly been rung because now the guy is blinking hugely like an owl, and Jared wants to laugh.

"I leave you alone for two minutes. _Two minutes_ , Jared." It’s Jensen, stuck like glue to his side, an adrenaline flush riding high on his cheeks and his eyes incredibly bright, glazed over and fixed on the asshole who started all of this.

But now it's two against one, and Jared doesn't really see the fairness in all of that, but he's glad for the company anyway, since this has the makings for a fairly terrible situation. Knock down, drag out barfight notwithstanding, Jared knows where there’s at least one bottle of hooch hidden in the car, and Jensen did say that he always has a back-up plan, and who knows how many other compartments in the car hide booze or cash or any other number of undesirable things, and he doesn’t particularly want to see the cops dragged into any of this.

Jensen tries to say something, something that will throw water on this particular brush fire, but it's already too late. Jensen reaches out a hand to touch the guy's shoulder, and the guy throws a huge roundhouse punch. It sends his jacket flaring out backward and Jared catches a flash, a polished brass badge and the distinct glint of gunmetal, and knows right then that everyone's in over their heads with this. Jared's picked a fight with a cop and this is only going to go from bad to worse. Jensen spins with the impact of the punch, a full pirouette, graceful enough to make even a Vaudeville dancer jealous, finishes the spin with a swift uppercut jab to the man's jaw.

There's a crack, and it could be the guy's face or it could be Jensen's knuckles, but at that moment, Jared's not terribly concerned with that, because there's blood on Jensen's face, bright, _bright_ red against the paleness of his skin, and it is starting to run in slender rivers toward his jaw.

Jensen's last punch has done the trick, though, sending the guy spinning backward toward a break in the crowd, and he lands with a crash and a few startled gasps from the fairly sizeable crowd this whole spectacle has attracted.

A hush follows, stretches out for what feels like an eternity, until the lawman rolls sluggishly to his side, coughing and hacking and spitting on the floor, a bubbly puddle of saliva and vivid blood.

"Ackles," the man says, and Jared feels a shock, thinks that this is what getting electrocuted might be like. "I thought I told you to never show your face here again."

"You know him," Jared says softly, surprised, working to catch his breath and trying to will his heartbeat into something resembling normalcy.

"We've met," Jensen says evasively. The glare he's giving the guy is murderous, the kind of look that could level whole cities. "And I can tell you that it didn't really go his way the last time either."  
And in that moment, Jared knows one thing for sure: he can trust Jensen to have his back in a way that is absolute, just like he can trust that the sun will always rise in the east every morning.

At their feet, the guy is struggling to get vertical again. Apparently Jensen doesn't like the idea of that and delivers a boot heel to his side, hard punch to the kidney and down he goes again. Jensen has to wrap his hand around Jared's forearm and start tugging him toward the door.

"What was that for?" Jared asks with a quick backward glance. The circle of people are just now closing in on him, a few people stooping down and trying to sit the guy up.

"It bought us a few minutes. C'mon. Now isn't the time to get all sentimental about it."

Jensen's weaving slightly, keys to the car in a death grip in his hand, but Jared takes him by the wrist and wrestles the keys away from him. The ease with which Jensen gives them up might be worrisome if Jared bothers to take a second to think it through, but he doesn't, only folds Jensen into the passenger seat with a steadying hand on the small of his back and another on the back of his neck. He cups Jensen's face in his hands, thumbs notched below his cheekbones and  
Jensen's day old beard rasping against his palms. Jensen grumbles, but lets Jared turn his face toward the light. The gash looks shallow, but it's still bleeding freely enough, streaks running down the side of Jensen’s face like red colored tears, and Jared takes his handkerchief from his back pocket and wads it up below Jensen's eye.

"Hold it there," he says, and circles around the car, gets behind the wheel, pumps the gas pedal twice to prime the pump and then turns the engine over and skids out onto the street.

His adrenaline boost is wearing off, leaving a headache and a vague sort of nausea in its wake. He's all at once exhausted, muscles feeling weak and hands trembling a little. The building has grown very small behind them before Jared says anything. "What was all that about?”

“What if I were to say that I was defending your honor?” Jensen pulls the handkerchief away, frowns at the blood, and Jared reaches over to force his hand back up to the gash below his eye.

“I would tell you that my honor is already a lost cause.”

“Well, then, I suppose we’re quite a bit alike in that regard, you and I.”

“You couldn’t be more wrong. You’re a good man, Jensen.”

“Yeah, sure,” Jensen says, dismissive. “Try telling that to our friend the deputy sheriff back there.”

Jared’s reaction is a visceral thing, and his whole body lurches, his grip so tight on the steering wheel that he thinks his fingers might be leaving some sort of permanent indentation. He might have also kicked out, his feet hitting the brake and the gas at the same time and the car shudders all around them. A turn is coming up, a wicked hairpin that will take them further down the mountain, and Jared’s mind goes through these lunatic cartwheels, believing that all he has to do is get them to a lower elevation and maybe he'll be able to think straight. Get them out of town and away from this godforsaken place and back into his small apartment above the pharmacy and all will be well. All will be very well indeed.

All of this is spinning through his head, a big ferris wheel of doubt and paranoia, and all he can think to say is, "Deputy Sheriff?"

"I hope so,” Jensen says “Didn't get a good look at his badge, I was a little too busy hitting him in the face. Might have gone federal for all I know," Jensen says.

"Fuck."

"That about sums it up," Jensen says, and then he does the most amazing thing. He starts to laugh, small titters at first that grow into wheezing, whooping chuckles, high-pitched and hysterical, and next he's wrapping an arm around his stomach and putting his head between his knees.

Jared is left dumbfounded, mouth wide open and working but no sound manages to come out. Vocal chords frozen and maybe they never will work again, until finally, "There's a story behind this, and I betcha it's a good one, and one day very soon you're going to tell me all about it, but at this point we need to find a hole to bury ourselves in. A very deep hole that's very far away. I'm thinking somewhere in the neighborhood of Yemen."

"Yemen?" Jensen says, trying to recover. "Where's that?"

"It's on the other side of the world."

"Fair enough. Turn here." Jensen points out a spot to the left, a near invisible break in the tree line. Jared does as he's ordered and turns down the narrow track, little more than twin wheel ruts that set the car to bouncing, shocks screaming and creaking at the uneven ground and the wheel trying to yank itself out of Jared's hands every few feet.

"The brakes feel slushy to me," Jared says, and he doesn’t like the sound of his own voice right now, the high, panicked edge of it.

Jensen nods. "It's on purpose. A custom job. I altered them as soon as I got the car. Helps on the hairpin turns up here in the hills. The steering's been realigned as well. And I bumped up the engine to give me a little more horsepower. Old rumrunner tricks of the trade. Give me an open road and a straightaway, and the revenuers don't have a car in their entire armada that can keep up."

"And you said you keep her around because she's pretty."

"Form and function, my darling boy. It's all about form and function. Speaking of which, you might want to pull over before you knock the wheels off of the car."

Jared does as he's told, finds a level spot between a few tree trunks and rolls to a stop. So much open space in this country, uninhabited by people. Jared never knew. "Let me see," he tells Jensen, reaching into the back of the car for his knapsack. He did have the presence of mind, to pack a first aid kit, not knowing what to expect from this adventure. He finds it, digs out some gauze and some iodine, takes the canteen that Jensen had tossed into the back seat earlier that day. He blinks, turns off the headlights because better safe than sorry, they're not far away enough from the scene of the crime and the potential lake full of hot water that he’d managed to had landed them in.

As if he’s been privy to Jared’s thoughts, Jensen says, “Handcuffs hurt worse when you’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Suppose you’re right about that.”

The engine ticks as it cools, metal chilling in the cold air, coils righting themselves again, and Jared says, "You wouldn't happen to have a flashlight?"

"You should know by now that I'm prepared for almost any eventuality," Jensen replies. "Should be one under the seat, unless it managed to fly out the window or something, the way that you drive." Jensen tries to dig in the space beneath his seat, but sits up fast, woozy and rocking some.

"Here," Jared says, hopping out of the car and going to Jensen's side. "Can you stand?"

Jensen hisses a pained breath between his teeth. "Gimme a minute."

"Don't, ah. Don't take this the wrong way."

Jared goes down on his knees in the ground, feels the nighttime dew from the underbrush as it seeps in through his pants and knows he’s going to be muddy by the end of this. He reaches beneath Jensen's seat and comes up empty handed, and then reaches back even further, hand coming in contact with something hard and metallic. If he'd been thinking a little straighter, had his head square on his shoulders, he would have pushed the thing along the floorboard and into the back, but he's a little busy pondering his life as a wanted man, and he's tired and he still hasn't had a decent meal since he left the coal miner’s place this morning, so the odds are generally stacked against him. He reaches a little further, resting his head on Jensen's leg to get a better angle on the thing. He feels the muscles of Jensen's thigh tighten up beneath him, and then finally relax.

It's curiously familiar and easy when Jensen places a hand on Jared's head, thumb tracing the shape of his cheekbone, and Jared freezes, all the air zipping out of his lungs for no less that the third time in the past hour. Jensen buries his hand in Jared's hair, fingers the curve of his ear, the callused pad of his thumb rough along his tender skin.

The peepers are out in force tonight, a droning, constant sound that's calming and lulls Jared’s frayed nerves. He closes his eyes and thinks that he could stay like this for hours, head in Jensen's lap, feeling sheltered from the outside world, It’s a bizarre moment, to feel calm and cared for, here, in the middle of god's nowhere, and Jared feels like something has just clicked into place, something that has almost been there the whole time they've been together, barely there and somewhat syncopated until now. Their timing has switched. They've lined up somehow.

"You find it yet?" Jensen asks, voice slurred and sounding wrung-out.

Jared clears his throat, comes back to the here and now, and he can just feel the shape of the flashlight slipping across his fingers. "Got it." He gets to his feet again and bends down low over Jensen, placing the flashlight on the dash and angling the thing so that it doesn't shine directly in Jensen’s eyes.

Jensen lolls his head back against the seat. "Am I gonna make it, doc?"

A spike of irritation flares in Jared and he mutters, "Don't call me that."

"Testy," Jensen says, but then goes quiet as Jared carefully removes the handkerchief and peers at the cut. The bleeding has slacked off, reduced to a slow trickle.

"Sorry," Jared says quickly. "It's. It's just. Never mind. You had no way of knowing."

"Knowing what?" Jensen asks, and his fingertips brush Jared's jacket sleeve, like he's thinking about taking Jared's hand, his wrist. The darkness throws the touch into relief. Jared wonders where this softer, more affectionate version of Jensen has come from all of the sudden. "You can't just say something like that and not follow through."

"Like you're one to talk," Jared says around a snort. "I was in medical school," he tells Jensen. He takes a deep breath, lets it out nice and slow.

"Did you flunk out?"

Jared shakes his head. "No, I left. My dad got sick and I--I had to leave."

"Did he--?" Jensen leaves the question open ended.

"He didn't make it," Jared says. It's a wound that's five years old and has never quite healed all the way up again, more like fresh stitches rather than an old break. The slightest nudge will set it to bleeding again.

"The war?" Jensen asks, voice hushed and rough.

"The flu."

"Sorry," Jensen says. "Mine’s gone too. We're so alike in a lot of ways, you and I."

"How did it happen?"

"He was a miner. Tunnel caved in on him. What a piece of fresh hell that was. They say it was instantaneous, but I never quite believed them. Don't know if it was the methane that killed him, or if the roof stove him in, or." Jensen pauses, a shake to his voice that he tries to level out. "He could have starved to death for all we know. Or suffocated. Left my mother and me destitute.  
Fifteen years on the job and the company pocketed the insurance money. She never saw a penny of it."

"Is that the crossroads of misfortune you were talking about before?"

"One stretch of it, yeah." Jensen goes quiet for a moment, cicadas and crickets filling in the void that his voice leaves behind. "Anyway, you don’t want to talk about it, so I won’t mention it again. The only thing I will say is that you should go back. You're smart. You'd do very well."

"One day, maybe," Jared says, putting the topic to rest.

He gets Jensen to his feet and cleans him up, and from this angle he can get a better look at the cut. His initial impression was correct; the gash runs long but it’s shallow, he must have gotten clipped by the guy's ring. Jared paints it with a stripe of iodine and Jensen hisses, little whine escaping from behind his clenched jaw.

"Don't be a wuss," Jared tells him. "I could have just as easily used the hooch you have hidden behind the seat. That really would have set your teeth on edge."

They're close, Jensen leaned against the side of the car and Jared bent toward him. Jensen's looking at Jared in this closed-off way. "What did you mean before,” Jensen says, “about your honor already being a lost cause?"

“It’s nothing.” Jared searches for something more to say, but he can't find a damn thing. It was a slip up. A monumental slip up and Jared wishes he could take it back, or at least find some way to make a joke out of it, but it's right there, hanging heavily between the two of them. A half-spoken truth, and a big part of Jared just wants Jensen to ask him outright, make the first move, because Jared’s a fool of a coward and damned if he's going to do it.

He thinks about his head on Jensen's thigh, thinks about Jensen pressed up behind him in the frozen morning, blankets piled on them and Jensen's hand on his hip. He's afraid of being wrong, but here, with Jensen's shoulder pressed against his in the dark Jared wonder's if he's not more afraid of being right.

Jared finds himself staring at Jensen's mouth, watches him pull his bottom lip between his teeth to leave it shiny and wet. The night is very, very still all around them. There's no one within shouting distance and for all Jared knows, the nearest sentient soul is miles and miles away. So much space in the world, and Jared wants nothing more than to crawl inside of Jensen's skin, make himself a little space inside of Jensen in the same way that Jensen's snuck inside of him.

“It’s not—“ Jared says, and stops when Jensen starts to speak at the same time.

"Jared, can I—" Jensen says then cuts off, shifts some so that their bodies are aligned, an inch apart. A fraction of an inch. He reaches out, slides his hand carefully along Jared's neck, fingertips cold where they come in contact with Jared's skin. "Goddamnit," Jensen whispers. "I told myself I shouldn’t do this.”

A hesitation, a tiny sliver of hesitation, and then Jared's leaning forward and Jensen's pushing up, bringing their chests flush together. And this is the best part, _absolutely_ the best part, that shattering split second before anything actually happens, all that built-up energy lighting up between them, Jared takes a slow breath, and then Jensen pulls Jared down by the back of his neck, pressing their lips together, and Jared's heart is lodged in his throat.

Jared freezes, pulse stuttering. It's been so long, months and months that stack up to years since Jared's let himself feel something like this, and even then it didn't match up to what’s happening right now, to the flex of Jensen's fingers along the base of his skull, the taste of Jensen’s mouth and the smell of him, sweat and the iodine that Jared used on his cut, and the scent of his skin underneath it all.

Before Jared knows it, before he can suck Jensen's bottom lip into his mouth like he wants to, Jensen is taking a step back, a clear blown look of shock on his face and his hand visibly trembling as he knocks his hat off of his forehead and scratches at his jaw, and Jared is still reeling from shock himself, because he'd meant to kiss Jensen back. It's the only damn thing that he wants to do.

Jared’s sure that he looks just as surprised as Jensen does. Jared can’t take his eyes off of Jensen, and suddenly the world seems a little brighter, everything seems that much less impossible, the whole goddamn universe just opened up and laid itself bare at Jared’s feet.

"Jensen," Jared says, because he likes the shape of Jensen's name in his mouth, and he likes what it does to his heart. "Try it again. Do it again."

"Really?" Jensen says, a hopeful smile on his face, worry lines a thing of the past, looking so young right now. Fragile and unguarded and it's a look that Jared really likes on him.

"Yeah. C'mere,” he says, “I want to kiss you back this time."

And for once in his fucking life, Jensen doesn’t pipe up with some sarcastic comeback. He simply does what he’s told. He steps right in, crowds Jared up against the cool metal of the car and takes his hat off, placing it carefully on the hood. He grins, smiles at Jared for all he’s worth and Jared doesn’t think that he’s ever seen anything quite so wonderful.

 

When Jensen kisses him again, Jared’s skin feels too tight and his head seems like it’s attached to his body with a thin, wavering string. It’s hotter this time and more wet, lips warm as they stray on the corner of Jared’s mouth. The flashlight rolls off and hits the ground. Jared sees red on the back of his eyelids after the beam hits them, and he drags Jensen flush up against him, realizing that at some point he closed his eyes, trusting Jensen enough to be serious about this.  
The last time he tried to kiss a man he got a black eye and a busted up mouth for his efforts.

Now Jensen has him by the front of his shirt. He yanks Jared in, widening his stance, making room. Jared's body gives in specific ways, fitting Jensen to him, hands splayed all along Jensen’s back, taking in the smooth shift of his shoulders and the way he arches into their kiss and damn, Jared could do this for hours. Days on end and never grow tired of it.

They push apart, and Jensen actually manages to look a little sheepish. “I’ve been wanting to do that since I first laid eyes on you back at the bar,” he admits. “Haven’t been able to think about anything else.” He teals a short, shy glance at Jared “Y’know, I kept thinking about the odds, and how they’d ever end up in my favor. My luck doesn’t usually run in that direction.”

“Odds of what?” Jared asks.

Jensen laughs. “The way I see it, I had about a two to one chance that you’d punch me in the face if I tried, and a ninety to one shot that you’d actually kiss me back.”

“Sounds pretty risky.” The night has taken on a surreal bend, a brand new surge of adrenaline making everything except Jensen feel very far away.

Jensen smiles at him, a full out no holds barred, beautiful grin that makes Jared’s stomach take a nosedive. “It was a chance I was willing to take.”

Jared laughs and reaches for him again. Jensen goes with it, allows Jared to pull him close, but only lands a gentle kiss to the side of Jared’s mouth. When Jared tries again, Jensen rises up on the balls of his feet and kisses the bridge of his nose.

“C’mon,” he says, pulling away, but his hand still lingers for a few seconds on the back of Jared’s neck. “Something tells me that we should put a few more miles in between us and our most recent misadventure.”

“You know, you were wrong,” Jared says. His pulse is rattling in his chest and his mouth still tingles “You said that you thought that I was going to be your good luck charm, but it seems to me like everything that could go wrong _has_ gone wrong.”

“No, my dear,” Jensen says, as he opens the passenger door. His grin turns wicked, positively steeped with mischief. “Everything is coming up roses. Every single thing.”

 

 

They’d driven through the night, with Jared driving first, ignoring Jensen’s constant badgering that the car would hold up just fine against a little more speed on the straight-aways, then handing over the reins to Jensen when his eyes started to cross and his vision started to blur. He’d spent a couple of hours in a fitful doze that left him more tired than when he started, had awoken disoriented, parked in a fallow field with Jensen using his shoulder for a pillow.

The sign hanging on the door is rusted, punched tin that advertises gas and cold drinks, and is clogged with road dust. It’s the only place around, the only place they’ve seen for miles, and Jensen pulls over to the shrill sound of the bell ringing inside the station.

Jared spills out of the car as the gas station attendant approaches Jensen’s window, casting an appreciative glance at Jensen’s car like a man looking at a pretty pair of legs. The attendant swipes a rag over the fender, creates a clean streak through the road grime, sun glinting brightly off of the slick, curved metal, then uses the same rag on his hands to little effect, engine grease dug so deeply into the cracks of his hands and his fingernails that it’s probably permanent by this point.

Jared stretches, working the kinks out of his back from being folded inside of the car for so long, kicking at a few loose rocks on the concrete. The door to the garage stands open, some decade old, road weary clunker sits inside, most of its guts strewn around it. A dog sits smack in the middle of the large opening, its tail thwaps against the floor when it catches Jared looking in its direction.

The gas station sits right on the side of the road, the pavement itself just sort of bleeding into the parking lot of the joint. Directly opposite, a family sits around their busted-up junker. From the look of it, everything they own is stacked on top of the truck. A wooden fence has been used to make the sides of the truck’s bed higher, and they bow outward under the pressure of boxes and furniture, cookware nailed into the sides of the thing. Four of them hunker around an exposed axel, poking out of the fender like some skeletal, knobby knee bone.

As Jared looks on, a man approaches Jensen, wiping his hands on the thighs of his coveralls, nervously adjusting the brim of his straw hat. His face has the look of a man who has spent his entire life outdoors, deeply lined skin the color of old, supple leather. He starts speaking with Jensen, hiking his thumb over his shoulder toward his car, and Jared saunters over, curious, catching only the last half of the conversation.

“--highway robbery, but it’s not like we have a lot of choice in the matter. I could always roll the wheel to the next mechanic, but we’re not sure how far that is, and anyhow, who’s to say that he won’t charge me twice as much?”

“How much?” Jensen says, his sight pasted on a couple of kids who appear to be playing some game fashioned out of three stones, two sticks, and a whole pile of sandy dirt.

“We have half of it. We need ten dollars. Now listen,” the man says, “I’m not asking for handouts, I have my pride.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a cloth wrapped broach, a delicately carved cameo, creamy white against a background of dark coral and framed in a fine silver filigree. Jared takes it, turns it over in his hand and holds it up to the bright sun. It’s the profile of a woman’s face, perfectly rendered with a strong Roman nose, hair bound in a band and falling down her neck and shoulders in detailed little swoops.

“It’s sardonyx,” Jared tells Jensen. “Said to bring good luck,” he points out, eyebrows raised.

Jensen opens his mouth to speak, but before he can, the gas station attendant joins them, starts pushing the man across the street with a harsh shout.

“Sorry about that, sir,” he says once he’s managed to run the man off. He spits between his teeth and continues, “That worthless man’s been here all morning. I’ve had to run him off of this property no fewer than four times so far. Can’t run him off of the road, though. Free country and all that.”

Jensen’s staring down at him with barely hidden contempt, nose wrinkled and lips twisted like he’s just gotten a mouthful of something sour. He hands the guy a twenty-dollar bill, and when he digs in his pocket to give Jensen his change, Jensen shakes his head. “Fix his wheel, and give him whatever’s left over.”

Ignoring the attendant’s argument, Jensen gets in his car and cranks the engine, starts off at barely a roll, and slows even further when he gets to where the man is standing on the side of the road. He holds the cameo out, face up on the palm of his hand. The man is clearly ashamed, persistent flush to his face and he’s refusing to look Jensen in the eye. “You forgot this back there.”

The man plucks it up from Jensen’s hand, opens his mouth to say something but nothing comes out.

Sullen and miserable, the mechanic crosses the street, takes the wheel from the car, and rolls it back toward the shop.

“You should hold onto that,” Jensen tells him. “Give it to your daughter when she grows up.”

“Thank you,” he says simply.

“Don’t,” Jensen replies, flattens his palm on the wheel of the car and steers them back onto the road.

"I didn't peg you for the Robin Hood type," Jared says. He takes a chance and slides his hand along the inside of Jensen’s thigh to give him a brief squeeze. He feels like love-drunk teenager, like a character straight out of one of those sappy Victorian romances his mother used to read when he was growing up. It’s ridiculous. Thrilling.

"These folks,” Jensen starts, waving in the direction of the family, still huddling around their car. “Okies, coal miners, the farmers in the Midwest, trying to grow grain in the desert. Everyone's always looking for the next big thing. So some folks pull up stakes and head west, and others just go where the wind blows them. It don't matter what they do or where they go, because they’ll never get it. The only difference is the color of the dust they end up choking on."

“You’re a regular social philosopher, too.”

Jensen shrugs, hikes up a corner of his mouth and gives Jared a sidelong glance. “See enough of this great nation of ours and a man can’t help but form a few opinions. Besides, if I’m Robin Hood, then you’re goddamn John Dillinger.”

 

 

They approach New York from the Jersey side, driving through a landscape made of metal and hazy with stinking coal smoke, factories and warehouses all around. The city skyline looms immense in front of them, cutting into the sky like a thing out of some futuristic novel, and no matter what she says, Jared still wishes that Lily was here to see it.

Once in the city proper, Jared can’t help but lean partially out of the window, his face turned skyward as he tries to see to the tops of the buildings.

“You might wanna close your mouth,” Jensen says. “You never know what might fly in.”

Jared sits back quickly, snaps his jaw closed. “Sorry,” he says, embarrassed. “I’ve only ever seen pictures before, and they don’t really do it justice.”

“No need. It makes me remember seeing it for the first time too. Y’know, what it felt like. It’s good to be reminded of that,” Jensen says, and turns onto a road wide enough to fit three cars side by side in either direction, which is good, since Jared’s never seen so many people and cars and storefronts in his life.

The Hotel Astor is more like a palace, it’s footprint is a city-block big and rises up twelve stories above the ground. Jensen parks in front of the grand entranceway, drops the keys into the white-gloved hand of a crisply dressed valet, and shakes his head minutely when Jared moves to grab his bag from the backseat.

A similarly outfitted doorman welcomes them into the lobby, and Jared takes two steps inside before freezing in his tracks, whistling low and trying to look in all directions at once. Shining marble everywhere, inlaid with polished brass in geometric designs. Members of metropolitan high society lounge on sofas and plush overstuffed chairs, clearly wanting to see and be seen.

Jensen touches Jared’s elbow to get him moving again. “If we have time later, I’ll give you the nickel tour.” He’s all swagger again, sauntering over to the main desk and either oblivious or ignoring the interested looks from the people hanging around the lobby.

“Hey there, Charlie,” Jensen says to the man behind the desk.

“Hello, Mr. Ackles,” Charlie greets him, then turns to Jared with a nod, “Good afternoon, sir. I trust you had a good trip?” He slides a key across the counter, and Jensen pockets it.

“Could have been better,” Jensen says with a shrug. “Could have been a lot worse.”

“May I ask if you’ll be in town long?”

“Impossible to say,” Jensen answers. “Maybe a day, maybe longer.” He takes a step away, then turns back. “Have some strawberries sent up to my room, would ya Charlie? And some seltzer. Ice too, while you’re at it.”

Charlie picks up the telephone on his desk, gleaming brass and ivory like the rest of the place. “Anything for you, sir?” he asks Jared.

“Um,” Jared stammers, “I wouldn’t mind a sandwich? Thanks.”

“Of course. Anything at all, sir.”

An elevator, mirrored inside and out, takes them to the tenth floor, and Jensen leads the way down a wide marble hall lined with potted palm plants and topped off with detailed molding along the ceiling.

“Wait a minute,” Jared says as Jensen opens a door at the end of the hall. “Do you live here?”

“Sometimes,” Jensen says. “As much as I live anywhere.”

“It must cost a fortune.”

Jensen sniffs. “Booze is big business, Jared. Buy low and sell high. Besides, I’m in with the manager here, got a little dirt on him, so he cuts me a hell of a deal.”

Their luggage has already been delivered, Jared’s bag placed carefully beside Jensen’s trunk, and they’re hardly inside the room before a member of the kitchen staff is pushing a cart through the doorway. Jensen removes the domed lid covering one of the platters, plucks up a strawberry by the stem and bites into it, closes his eyes and hums happily.

“I could live off of these things, I swear. Anyway,” he says around another bite as he points at different doors in the suite, “bedroom, bathroom, everything else.” Hiking a thumb toward the windows, he continues, “Pretty nice view.”

The bathroom is twice the size of Jared’s bedroom above the pharmacy, the tile a bright turquoise color that continues from the floor up to about chest level on the walls. The tub is a huge thing, claw-footed and standing alone in the center of the floor. Jared bends over the sink, lets the water run until it starts to steam up the mirror, scrubs at his face, and threads his wet fingers through his hair. He picks through the toiletries on the shelf, sniffs at the flowery shampoo, soaps and creams, wonders whether Jensen was the one to pick those out and hopes to hell that he wasn’t.

The main room is empty, so Jared wanders toward the bedroom, taking a second to twitch open the curtains and sneak a peek at the impressive view. The bedroom is as lavish as the other rooms, deep blue wallpaper with some transparent metallic fleur-de-lis design embossed on it, expensive furnishing all around, topped off with a large, four-poster bed.

Two days ago, Jared was sleeping in a shack in the backyard of a broke coalminer, and now he’s here, ambling through finery that most people only ever dream about, and the strangest thing of all is that he can’t for the life of him decide which is better.

Jensen’s standing in front of the wardrobe, doors flung open wide so that he can shuffle through his clothes. He’s stripped down to his undershirt, his trousers hanging crookedly on his hips.

“Nothing in here’s gonna fit,” he says.

Jared leans against the doorway, crosses his arms and cocks his head to the side. “I don’t know what to make of you. As soon as I think I’ve got you figured out…”

“That makes two of us. Most of the time, I can’t either, if that makes you feel any better.”

"Not particularly, but thanks for trying," Jared says, looping his arms around Jensen's neck when Jensen comes close enough. Jared's not sure of the boundaries of this thing, but is willing to push at them anyway, figure out exactly where Jensen draws the line, or if he draws any line at all. He cups the back of Jensen's head, enjoying the crushed velvet feel of his short hair, then ducks down to lightly kiss him.

Jensen gives as good as he gets, angling his head just so and deepening the kiss, small nips at Jared's mouth, sucking on Jared's bottom lip and then his tongue when Jared licks into him.

"Strawberries," Jared says, and moves down to kiss along Jensen's jaw, a day's worth of stubble rough on his lips and his tongue.

"Told you I could live off of those things. And you,” he adds, “I could definitely live off of you." Jensen says. He pushes harder against Jared, hemming him in against the doorjamb. It occurs to Jared that there's a perfectly good bed just a few steps away, but right now he's not terribly concerned with that, more occupied by the feel of Jensen's hands on the small of his back, their restless movement, the way Jensen's fingers dig into his waist and then sneak under his shirt and up along his ribs.

Jared startles a bit when Jensen moves south, skates his palm along the front of Jared’s pants. He’s not experienced, not by any stretch. Other than his own, Jared has had someone's hand on his dick precisely five times, and the first time didn't really count. Those other times don’t hold a candle to this. Jensen's grip on him is sure and solid, urging him fully hard. There’s confidence in every scrape of his teeth along Jared's jaw and every nip and bite at Jared's mouth.

"You alright?" Jensen asks with a low laugh as Jared jumps again when he snaps open the top button on Jared’s pants.

"Yeah," Jared breathes out, fighting to stay upright and force his lungs to do their job. "I'm--I'm great."

“You can’t tell me to stop anytime you want. No harm done.” Jensen shoves at Jared’s pants, takes his shorts down right along with them until they’re bunched around his thighs.

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Jared swallows hard, his mouth suddenly bone-dry, his body hot all over.

“Good answer.” Jensen blinks slowly, his expression heated and low-lidded. He drops his eyes to Jared’s cock, swollen rock hard and hanging heavily between Jared’s legs, then jacks him from base to tip in the loose circle of his fingers. It’s nothing but a tease, the barest hint of friction but it still drags a soft groan out of Jared, makes him jab his hips forward and grasp at Jensen’s shoulders.

Jared’s groan seems to light a fire in Jensen, and he kisses Jared hard, pushes his tongue inside and traces the shape of Jared’s teeth, the roof of his mouth. Jared grabs handfuls of Jensen’s ass and squeezes, tries to pull him in that much more close. Jensen gasps into Jared’s mouth shivers against his chest, his shoulder bumping into Jared as he strengthens his grip on Jared’s cock.

“Tell me what you want, Jared. Tell me anything and it’s yours.”

Jared doesn’t know where to start, reeling with so many possibilities that it’s impossible to land on just one. “Faster,” Jared manages, and a second later, “harder.”

“Yeah?” Jensen says, voice pitched low and hoarse. “I’ll go one better.” Jensen spins them around and stoops down, braces his back against the doorframe and clutches at Jared’s hip for balance with one hand.

“Holy—“ Jared mutters, anticipation building in his gut as Jensen darts his tongue out and licks the tip of his cock.

“Not exactly,” Jensen tells him with a dark look. “But I do appreciate the sentiment.”

He pulls Jared nearer to him, takes the head of Jared’s cock into his mouth and sucks, hollows his cheeks around it and closes his eyes. His face smoothes out, and Jared thinks that he almost looks relieved, like some constant thread of tension has finally unraveled.

Sex had always been a thing that was deviant for Jared. A secret, dirty itch that needed to be scratched. He never knew it could be like this. Nobody every told him. There’s something so indulgent about this moment, something incredibly decadent about having Jensen’s mouth on his cock right now, with the afternoon sunlight streaming in through the open curtains, the sounds of the city pouring in from below.

Jensen swallows him down further, soft lips a tight seal around the width of Jared’s cock, the muscles in his neck flexing as he works his mouth up and down. Jared trips ahead a step, knees buckling, tilts so that he’s towering over Jensen, his forearm resting against the doorframe and his hips thrusting forward a fraction.

Jensen makes an appreciative, happy sound that causes a whole new wave of sensation to zip along Jared’s spine, and sends him crashing toward his orgasm. Jared tries to warn him, fingers skipping across the back of Jensen’s neck, but it only serves to spur Jensen on, and he sucks Jared down more deeply, opens his jaw wider and flattens his tongue along the underside of Jared’s cock. He only pulls off at the very last second, spit-slick hand pumping Jared’s orgasm out of him, mouth slack and open, tongue snaking out to catch sticky, hot pulses of Jared’s come.

Jared shudders, holds his breath and bites the inside of his cheek to stem the sated moan that builds in the back of his throat. Jensen’s still on his knees, his mouth and chin sloppy with spit and come, his face flushed and his cock a hard line that pushes at the front of his pants. It takes Jared almost a full minute for his senses and his manners to line up again.

He pulls Jensen to his feet and kisses him, the taste of his own come in Jensen’s mouth enough to make his dick twitch feebly, fumbles and shoves at the waistband of Jensen’s pants. He’s impatient, can’t to get his hand on Jensen’s cock, to learn the weight and the feel of him.

Jensen’s not much help, mouthing on Jared’s collarbone, his spit soaking through Jared’s shirt, then setting his teeth in the meat of Jared’s shoulder when Jared finally works his pants free and slips his hand inside the slit of Jensen’s shorts.

It doesn’t take long. Jensen’s half there already, hitches his hips and fucks into Jared’s hand, precome slicking the way. He tips backward, angles his shoulders against the wall and scrabbles for Jared’s wrist, mouth pulling into a snarl that looks almost painful as he comes, spunk shooting up along Jared’s arm and soaking into the front of his shirt.

Jared’s legs aren’t behaving the way they ought to, He’s pleasantly dizzy, and still somehow extremely turned on, head spinning with all the things he wants to do with Jensen and _to_ Jensen. The massive bed is like a siren call, and Jared tries to pull Jensen in that direction, only Jensen puts on the brakes.

“As much as I’d like to lay you out and make use of every square inch of that bed, we’ve got work to do. We’re going out, so get cleaned up. Again.”

 

 

 

 

“It’s all about looking the part, and right now you look like you just got spit out of one of those fraternity parties they talk about in _Vanity Fair_.” Jensen holds the door open for Jared and pushes him inside the store. Jared’s never been anywhere like this before, usually orders all of his clothes through the catalogs that get mailed to the pharmacy. He’s tall, big in the shoulders and skinny around the waist and knows he’s a tough fit, has to have everything he buys tailored for him by the seamstress that works at the dry cleaners a block away from his place.

 

“Mr. Ackles,” a man says as soon as they walk through the door. _Mr. Walter, owner_ is engraved on the brushed brass surface of his name badge on his lapel. A measuring tape hangs from around his neck and he has a pincushion attached to his wrist by an elastic band. His hair is parted on the side, slicked down so much that the shape of his skull can be seen underneath it.

 

A couple hours later, Jared has been poked and prodded to distraction. He’s been measured and re-measured, shoved into all manner of shirts and jackets and vests that don’t quite fit, and now he’s standing here in the finished product, wanting very badly to get his fingers under his collar and give it a good yank.

 

Jensen’s been sitting on a plush chair in the fitting room as Mr. Walter clucks and tuts over Jared, his legs crossed, an untouched glass of wine at his elbow. He keeps moving his finger thoughtfully along his bottom lip, a subconscious habit that’s distracting Jared to no end.

“It’s the best I can do on such short notice,” Walter says, circling around Jared and pulling on Jared’s suit jacket, setting it straight on his shoulders, testing the fit and the length of the sleeves. “If you give me a day to make some alterations--”

“It’s marvelous. We’ll take it,” Jensen interrupts, “Put it on my tab.”

“Yes, sir.”

When Walter leaves, Jared is finally able to loosen the tie and shrug out of the jacket. “I feel like one of those dress up dolls you see in the window of the toy store,” he complains. “I can’t wait to get out of this thing.”

Jensen stands, crosses the room to slide his hand up the front of Jared’s vest, fiddles with his tie and tucks some stray hair behind Jared’s ear. He gives him his best smile and says, “And I can’t wait to _get_ you out of it, but we have some business to attend to first.”

 

 

 

 

For the first time since this enterprise began, Jared feels like he’s in his element. Sure, this place is glitzier than his speakeasy, it’s louder and larger and the clientele have a lot more money, but the polished wood of the bar table feels familiar under his fingers, the bartenders keep their sleeves rolled up and their aprons starched, just like back home, and the pervasive smell of liquor is comforting.

Jared’s tucked into a booth near the back, straight whiskey in a glass at his fingertips and Jensen sitting close to his side.

The crowd lets out a cheer as a man makes his appearance at the entrance, even the smoky-voiced jazz singer on the stage pauses in the middle of her song. The man is tall, dark curly hair and dark eyes, has a wide-open smile, and when he waves, Jared can see the glint of gold rings on almost every one of his fingers.

“That’s the man we’re here to see,” Jensen says, ducking to speak close to Jared’s ear so that he can be heard over the noise.

“Who is he?” There’s something about him that Jared can’t quite put his finger on. Something familiar.

“Jeff Morgan. He owns half the gin-mills in this city, and has the rest of them under his thumb, far as anyone can tell.”

“Goddamn,” Jared says. He knocks back half of the glass, and then comes back for seconds.

“I take it you’ve heard of him,” Jensen says. It isn’t a question.

“You could say that.” Morgan’s one of the most infamous figures in the booze trade. Rumors say that he owns half the distilleries on St. Pierre Island, and that most of the liquor that comes into the city gets there on boats that circuitously belong to him. There’s even talk that he has the Coast Guard running his rum upon occasion. He’s never been caught; so slick that even rain slides right off of him.

“Let’s get this over with,” Jensen says, a grim look on his face as he slides out of the booth.

Morgan’s seated at the center of his reserved table, surrounded by his lackeys like a king holding court. A slender man is balanced on his knee, barely twenty by the look of him, and Morgan is feeding him champagne straight out of the bottle.

“Interesting,” Jared says, under his breath.

“Yeah, it’s the city’s best kept secret that isn’t actually a secret at all.” Jensen says it with a sneer that makes Jared think that there might be some kind of history there. It dredges up Jared’s curiosity, makes him think about how much he still doesn’t know about Jensen, but he keeps his mouth shut.

Morgan’s eyes go wide the moment he sees Jensen, and he sends his company away with the tiniest movement of his hand.

“Jensen,” he says, “my prodigal son. Returning to the fold, I see.” Morgan’s voice is deep, he purrs at Jensen in a way that immediately gets under Jared’s skin.

Jensen turns down an invitation to sit at Morgan’s table, introduces Jared as a business associate and gets right down to it. “I need ten cases. Tonight, if you can swing it. And I know you can.”

“Of course I can,” Morgan says with a smile. “You’re talking chump change, kid. I prefer to deal in volume, but I’ll cut you a deal for old time’s sake. A thousand, cash. Six hundred now and the rest at pick-up.”

“Son of a bitch,” Jensen snarls. “That’s almost twice the going rate.” He clenches his fists, knuckles bloodless and white. A muscle starts to tic in his jaw.

Morgan sits back in his chair. “That’s what we in the business call cornering the market. You and I both know that you wouldn’t come to me unless you have to.”

Jensen narrows his eyes, presses his mouth into a strict, angry line, and Jared realizes he needs to do something to diffuse the situation, and he needs to do it fast. Picking a fight with Jeff Morgan is bad enough, a hundred times worse when it’s happening under his own roof. Jared also knows that he didn’t come all this way to go back empty-handed.

“Listen,” Jared says, bending over to press his knuckles against the table. “You’re a business man, and you’re in it to make money, I get that.” He’s scared, in over his head by about a mile, and doesn’t know how he’s managing to keep his voice steady. “I could tell you some sob story about how I’m sunk into my bar up to my neck, about how everything I own is wrapped up in it, in one way or another, and if it goes bust, so do I. All of that would be true. But see, it’s not about me, and it never has been.”

Morgan hunches forward, elbows on the table and fingers tented in front of him. “Go on. I’m listening.”

“ Like I said, whether you cut us a fair deal's not about me. It's about the guy who guards the door for hours and hours at a clip to keep us all safe, and it’s about the girl who plays the piano, who has two kids at home and a deadbeat for a husband. It’s about the kid that comes in after we close to scrub the floors and wash the glasses, and the guy who cooks the books, and the man who does our laundry. It’s about the goddamn paperboy, and everybody else who gets paid with money we make selling gin.”

Morgan raises an eyebrow, looks at Jensen and asks, “Is he done?” Morgan asks.

Jared straightens, feels the press of Jensen’s hand at the small of his back, and takes one more shot of courage from it. “And it’s about fucking over JD Rockefeller.”

Morgan is very still for a few stretched out moments, carefully considering. Jared holds his breath. Finally, he claps his hand on the table. “Six hundred. Pay up front.”

“Four,” Jared counters. He’s already come this far. It can’t hurt to go a little further.

“Five.”

“Four and a half, and throw in a bottle of that champagne you’re drinking. On the house.”

Morgan tosses his head back and laughs. “You’ve got yourself a deal, kid.” He waves a waitress over, whispers something in her ear, and she rushes off. “What are you, a lawyer or something?”

Jared shrugs. “Medical school dropout.”

“Even better.” Morgan turns to Jensen. “Where did you pick him up, anyway?”

“Some street corner a couple of hundred miles south of here,” Jensen answers. He’s not taking his eyes off of Jared, and he seems to be fighting a smile.

“Don’t lose him,” Morgan says.

“I don’t plan on it.”

 

 

 

Jensen cracks open the bottle of champagne as soon as they step into the elevator, and Jared glances pointedly at the carefully complacent man operating the lever.

“You’re in New York, my darling boy,” Jensen reminds him. “Here, prohibition is more of a technicality rather than a hard and fast rule.” He takes a sip and passes it over to Jared.

Jared takes a sip. The stuff is sweet, bubbly, tickles Jared’s nose in a way that’s not entirely unpleasant, so he goes for a second sip, and then a third before handing it over to Jensen again.

Almost a third of the bottle is gone by the time they make it to Jensen’s floor, and they walk arm in arm through the corridors, passing it back and forth, stealing small looks at each other like a couple of love-drunk teenagers. Jared’s pleasantly buzzed, but Jensen’s weaving a little by the time they find Jensen’s suite, and he completely misses the keyhole three full times before Jared snatches the key from him and does it himself.

As they tumble into the room, Jared says, “For a bootlegger, you have absolutely no tolerance.”

The grin Jensen gives him is beatific, all innocence through and through. “It’s what we in the business call irony.” He takes one last sip, then holds the bottle up to Jared’s mouth for him to finish it off.

Crossing the room, Jensen leaves a trail of clothes in his wake. His shoes are the first to go, followed by his jacket, which he throws over a chair, his shirt and undershirt tossed on top of that a moment later. He spins to face Jared, threading Jared’s tie between his fingers and using it like a leash as he pulls Jared toward the bedroom.

“I still can’t believe that you pulled that off,” Jensen says, circling behind Jared and easing the jacket off of Jared’s shoulders. He remains behind him, pulls the tie loose and untucks Jared’s shirt, deft fingers making quick work of the buttons. “There might be hope for you after all.”

“I bet you wouldn’t have said that a few days ago, when you thought that I was just the muscle of the operation,” Jared says. He’s mostly kidding, but then again, he’s mostly not.

“You’re right about that,” Jensen agrees. “There are a lot of things that I wouldn’t have said a few days ago.” His voice has taken on a tone that skips right past teasing and heads straight for sexy as hell. He backs Jared up to the bed, tents his fingers on Jared’s chest and shoves at him to tip his balance and make him drop onto the mattress with a small bounce. A second later, he’s pulled Jared’s undershirt over his head and is crawling into his lap, straddling Jared’s hips.

“God, Jared. Watching you take on Morgan like that? I couldn’t get you back here fast enough.” Jensen’s mouth is open before he even gets to Jared, licking inside from the start. Jensen begins to circle his hips in tiny bursts, sliding his ass along Jared’s cock. Jared’s instincts get the best of him and he bucks up, hands splayed wide on the small of Jensen’s back to flip them over, spreading his knees to make a space for himself between Jensen’s legs. Jared pins Jensen’s arms, holding Jensen’s wrists above his head, likes the way Jensen’s pulse amps up in response. How it makes Jensen’s eyes go wide, the darkness of his pupils eating up all of the green until only a sliver is visible.

Jared feels reckless, half crazy, riding some kinda high that can’t be blamed on a little bit of champagne. He rolls his hips up and in, rubbing his cock along hot line of Jensen’s, tasting Jensen’s breath as the two of them strain and struggle against each other.

“Would you let me?” Jared asks. The small quiet part of his internal clockworks that controls his rational thought is losing out to his drive to get closer to Jensen, as close as he can get.

“Fuck. Yeah. Yes. I’ve never wanted anything more in my life.”

Jared rolls onto his back, lifts and kicks his pants off, his cock straining and curving toward his stomach. He jacks himself idly, watching as Jensen finishes ditching his own clothes and digs underneath the stack of pillows on the bed. He unscrews the cap from the small bottle he’s found, slicks up Jared’s fingers then laying back on the bed, spreading his knees wide and staring over at Jared in a way that would put any pin-up girl in the world to shame.

He opens Jensen up slowly, gradually, waits for Jensen to nod before adding another finger. He keeps his eyes on Jensen’s face the whole time, wanting to memorize every change in Jensen’s expression, fold it up in some small corner of his memory and never let it go.

With a frustrated sound, Jensen shifts, straddles Jared’s hips and plants his hands firmly on Jensen’s chest for balance. It turns out that Jensen has a definite idea of how he wants this to go, and Jared’s only too happy let him have his way. Jensen finds the bottle in the tangle of blankets and slicks Jared up, jacking him a couple of times from base to tip, then lines them up. He hisses through the stretch as he sinks down on Jared’s cock.

It’s slow, almost painfully slow and Jared wants nothing more but to push up inside of Jensen as deeply as he can go. Instead, he concentrates on the sight of Jensen, the arch of his back and how he lets his head hang forward, the feeling of Jensen’s thighs beneath his hands, and the flush that spreads all over his chest.

Jensen slides down a little further, leans forward and kisses the corner of his mouth, curiously chaste in the face of all else, then lifts up again, his tight rim stretching around the flared head of Jared’s cock. Jared feels it the instant Jensen relaxes, opens up and takes Jared in all the way. A sigh slips from Jensen’s lips as he fucks down on him again, his ass flush against Jared’s thighs. He starts in on an easy sinuous slide, gasps when Jared wraps his hands around his waist and begins to push up, countering Jensen’s movements.

Jensen’s cock slaps against Jared’s belly with every thrust, dotting his belly with clear beads of precome. Jared takes him in his fist, jerks him fast and hard, bites off a curse when Jensen clenches down all around him, thighs tightening around Jared’s waist as Jensen comes like a shot, hot spunk mixing with the sweat on Jared’s skin.

“God, Jared. Fuck. _Fuck_.”

And it’s the sound of Jensen’s voice that does Jared in, the broken, wrecked rasp of it. Jared’s vision goes blurry, indistinct around the edges, and he bears down on Jensen, holding him in place, toes curled against the mattress as he comes hard, hips moving in desperate, shallow thrusts.

Jensen topples forward, blankets Jared’s body with his own, chests flush together and sloppy with sweat. Hazy, Jared thinks about the bathtub in the other room, and how it might be nice to scrub Jensen’s back, get him clean so he can dirty him up all over again. He scrapes his fingernails gently along the ridge of Jensen’s spine, shifts a little and is about to open his mouth to speak, but Jensen beats him to it.

Jensen brushes Jared’s sweaty hair away from his face, and presses his lips to the bridge of Jared’s nose. He stares at Jared in a way that makes Jared believe that he’s not the only one trying to commit some things to memory.

“I can hear you thinking from all the way over here,” Jensen says. “Just. Gimme a minute, okay? Just a minute.”

 

 

 

 

Jared pads out into the hallway, lets the door close behind him with a quiet click, careful not to rouse Jensen. It’s hours before dawn and the corridor is empty and silent. He’s still mildly tipsy, doesn’t want to test his stomach against the lurch of the elevator, so he decides to go up rather than down, and roams the maze of halls until he finds a stairway.

Two flights of stairs take him to the hotel’s rooftop garden, as ornate and elegant as the rest of the place. Wrought iron benches and tables dot the open space. Evergreens trimmed in geometric shapes stand in raised beds, and strings of tiny white lights crisscross above Jared’s head.

Jared’s the only soul up here and he crosses to the railing, stares down at the street a dozen stories below. The city is still awake, but subdued by the hour. The jazz halls are closed for the night, the legal ones, anyhow, and the storefronts are all dark. People walk along the sidewalk, hunched together in small groups of twos and threes, and cars are rolling slower down the street than earlier today.

He thinks about going home tomorrow. He thinks about trivial things like the backlog of orders he’d left behind, and about how he forgot to write down the formula for the liniment that Miss Esther uses for her arthritis so that Jim could make it instead. His thoughts keep circling around to Jensen, over and over like a scratched record. He keeps picturing Jensen’s smile, the look on his face the first time he’d kissed Jared, and the completely different expression the last time they’d kissed. A fierce protectiveness smacks into him when he wonders where Jensen will be this time next week, who he’ll be with and whether he’ll be safe. What it would take to make Jensen stick around, for a little while at least, and whether he should even try.

The rooftop door opens behind him, and Jared spins to find Jensen spilling out of it in a rush. His hair stands up in sloppy spikes, and he’s got lines on his face from his pillow. His shirt is rumpled and the buttons are misaligned. His shoulders relax the instant he sees Jared, and his walk slows to his characteristic amble.

“There you are,” he says, and joins Jared in leaning against the railing.

“You fell asleep before giving me the nickel tour you promised,” Jared teases. “Reckon I had to do it myself.”

“There’s still time,” Jensen says. “I’ve got a few days to kill before my next gig. I could show you around the city some.”

Jared shakes his head. He knows himself. Two days would turn into four, and then maybe a week or longer. Jared doesn’t need a couple of years of schooling under his belt to recognize that a clean break is a hell of a lot easier to set than a crooked one.

“We should get to bed then,” Jensen says with a bump of his hip against Jared’s. He doesn’t sound disappointed, just resigned, and that cuts into Jared more deeply than he’d expected. “Leave early enough and we’ll get you home by lunchtime.”

“Wait,” Jared says, partly because he’s not at all tired, and partly because he wants to listen to Jensen’s voice for a little while longer. “You never told me about the deputy sheriff.”

Jensen chuckles. “Well, his son and I used to be thick as thieves. We grew up together. The very first time I tasted moonshine was because he brought it to me.” He moves behind Jared and circles his arms low around Jared’s waist. Jared leans back and Jensen says into his ear, “We were young, and if you grew up where we grew up, your prospects were…limited, to say the least. Anyway, we saved up our money and bought all the fixin’s for a still, set it up in a hollow outside town. Fancied ourselves regulation moonshiners.”

“I think I see where this is going,” Jared says.

As Jensen goes on, his accent grows thicker. “His daddy caught wind of it, how I never did find out. Of course he blamed me for leading his innocent son down the garden path, but he didn’t know that half of it. We did a lot more than brew liquor in those woods.”

“What happened to him?” Jared asks, turning around to face Jensen.

He tightens his embrace on Jared for a second before letting go. “Last I heard, he found God. I’m pretty sure he found Him on the end of his father’s switch. And me, well. I found the road.” “Can’t help but think that I got the better end of the bargain.”

 

 

 

 

The drugstore is filled with its usual cast of characters. Kids mill around the candy shelves, counting the coins they scrounge out of their pockets. Dock workers clog the soda counter in the back, lining up for one of Kate’s famous root beer floats. A few people pace up and down the center aisle, waiting for Jim to finish putting together their orders.

All is as it should be. The store is still standing. They haven’t been busted. Jared should be happy about this, take some small comfort in the familiarity and the routine of it, but he doesn’t. His fingers are sore from chewing his nails to the quick on the trip home, and his jaw aches from grinding his teeth so hard that he’s surprised he didn’t crack a few when he ran out of fingernails to gnaw. All of this pales in comparison to the huge hollow space that’s so recently taken up residence in his chest.

It had been a nerve wracking trip, to say the least, literally sitting on a dozen cases of hooch. There was a discernable slosh every time Jensen hit the brakes too hard. Some had been hidden in compartments beneath and inside the front and back seats, and more in Jensen’s trunk strapped to the back of the car. Enough to keep the speakeasy stocked for a couple of months if they kept to their usual schedule. Maybe longer.

Misha sits on a stool behind the cash register, his nose buried in the morning paper. When the bell rings over the door, he flips one corner of it down and acknowledges Jared with a small nod.

Jared ducks under the counter, smiles at a couple of repeat customers as he feels underneath for the hidden key. It’s not in its usual spot, but just then Jim comes up beside him and slips it into his pocket.

“Took you long enough,” Jim says low, but he claps Jared on the shoulder and offers up one of his very rare smiles.

“Not quite done yet,” Jared murmurs. It’s one of several safeguards; the basement door only unlocks from the inside. He makes for the back stairway and takes them two at a time, then rushes across the empty bar. Jared slots the key into the lock and pauses, feeling like a man about to face the gallows, forehead pressed to the metal door, waiting for the painful lump in his throat to ease off.

Five minutes. He only has to make it through five more minutes. Five minutes of pretending that he’s fine, that sending Jensen away with a slap on the back and a kiss on the cheek is the right thing to do. The only thing to do.

He unlocks the door, cracks it open and steals a few seconds to look at Jensen. Just look at him. He’s soaked in sunshine, leaning against his car. His arms and ankles are crossed, his face tipped down and mostly hidden by his hat, just like the first time they met. And for a second, Jared hates him. Hates Jensen’s sarcasm and his wit, his smile and his laugh, hates his quiet generosity the way he sees the good in the sort of people that others can’t wait throw away. He hates all of these things and a hundred more besides, and the low-down bitch of the thing is that he loves all of it twice as much.

Jensen looks up as Jared opens the door the rest of the way. “I was starting to think that you got lost,” he says.

Jared hums, not ready to trust his voice quite yet, shoulders past Jensen and levers up the back seat to reveal the first five cases.

Taking up a post at the mouth of the alley, Jensen keeps watch while Jared unloads the cargo, places it in neat stack inside the door of the speakeasy. He’ll recruit Chris to help him stash it later. The entire time he counts the seconds. Five minutes. He might be able to cut it down to four is he moves fast enough. Possibly three and a half.

Jared finishes and puts Jensen’s car to rights. He rubs his sleeve on the chrome handle of the car door until it shines, concentrates on buffing it and not looking Jensen in the eye.

“We made a good team back there,” Jensen starts. “You’re pretty handy in a tight spot.”

Jared nods, tries not to latch onto all the things that Jensen isn’t saying. “I saved your ass and you know it,” he says, trying to cover up with bravado.

Jensen scuffs his shoe against the cobblestones, and Jared wishes he would just get it over with, stop drawing it out.

“My ass, and my face,” Jensen points out. “I kinda think that’s more important.”

“Depends on who you ask,” Jared jokes.

Jensen tries for a smile and hits well south of one. He opens his arms and Jared steps into them, a huge, carved-out space where his willpower used to be, and holds onto Jensen very tightly for the longest time, his face buried in Jensen’s neck and his hands balling into fists on Jensen’s back. Jared doesn’t bother to count. It’s been longer than five minutes.

Jensen presses his lips to Jared’s temple, three brief little kisses, and that’s when Jared’s resolve breaks down entirely.

“You could stay,” he whispers, right in Jensen’s ear. “Lay low and go legitimate for a while. See how it suits you.” It’s not fair. It’s not even in the same hemisphere as fair. It's asking Jensen to give up one of his defining characteristics, one of the things that makes him who he is.

Jensen breathes out with force, his breath warm on Jared’s neck. “Sweetheart, don’t you see? We’re criminals. We’re always gonna _be_ criminals.” He takes Jared’s face in his hands, thumbs swiping at the thin skin beneath his eyes. Jensen kisses him, says against Jared’s mouth, “I’ll come back. I promise.”

Although he told himself he wouldn’t, Jared watches Jensen get in his car, get it started and put it in gear. Hell, he even waves when Jensen gets it rolling, but then resolutely turns away.

Jared supposes that’s the thing about giving somebody your heart. You’re not allowed to ask for it back.

The door had slipped closed while Jared wasn’t paying attention, and he tries the handle, knowing full well it’s locked. Jared waits a couple of minutes, wishing Chris was around, so he could steal a smoke from him and have something to do with his hands. He doesn’t want to risk catching another glimpse of Jensen’s car. It was hard enough the first time, and Jared doesn’t think he’ll be able to stomach a second time. So he waits, counts the seconds until he loses track, and jogs toward the front door of the pharmacy. Misha turns down the corner of his paper down again. He’s showing a little more interest this time, eyebrows raised and a small smile playing around his mouth.

Someone taps on Jared’s shoulder, and he spins to find Jensen standing close, a root beer float clenched in one hand, and another balanced in the crook of his elbow, dripping ice cream onto his coat. Jared’s half-way to pissed before Jensen looks up at him with a wry grin, and hands him one of the floats.

 

“The things you do to me,” Jensen says, shaking his head. “So, ah. Do you wanna go fishing?”

 

//

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [ART & VID: Together like the Devil and Sin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/866785) by [mithborien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mithborien/pseuds/mithborien)




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